


Trump Cards

by Zhelana



Category: Real Person Fiction
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Dystopia, Gen, Holocaust, Mental Health Issues, Mental Institutions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-08
Updated: 2017-01-08
Packaged: 2018-09-15 15:52:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 12
Words: 35,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9242819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zhelana/pseuds/Zhelana
Summary: Trump becomes president - What could possibly go wrong?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I do not own any of the world leaders in this story, the majority of whom are real people. I'm just borrowing them. I am not making any money off of this, just blowing off a little steam.

Katy rocked back and forth in her chair in the waiting room at the Veterans Affairs hospital. She hated new psychiatrists, but of course, her old psychiatrist couldn’t wait around for an undetermined amount of time without a job just hoping some kind of miracle would happen. However, the miracle did happen, if you could call something so devastating a miracle. So there was a new psychiatrist, and a new psychologist. She knew she’d get used to them eventually, just like she’d gotten used to every previous change, but that didn’t help much in the moment. 

Psychiatry at the VA always ran on time, so she was unsurprised when at precisely 3:00pm, she heard her name called. A friendly voice soothingly said, “Hi. I’m Dr. Hoffman. I’m your new psychiatrist.”   
“A man?” she thought silently, but only smiled and greeted him in return. They walked through the maze that was the doctor’s office at the VA. Even after 4 years, it was still familiar to her, but she still couldn’t make her way through it without help. As they reached Dr Hoffman’s office, he gestured for her to sit down. Everything was familiar, almost as though it hadn’t been four years since anyone used these rooms. Almost as though the disaster had never happened. She realized that Dr Hoffman was speaking to her, saying “…looked through your chart from Doctor Gordon-Brown, but of course we have no idea what you have been up to for the last four years. But let’s talk a little bit about what your life was like before things changed. Can you give me some kind of an idea?” 

I had a twin sister. We were identical. We were pretty much inseparable. We went to my parents’ place for all kinds of holidays, birthdays… we hung out together with the same groups of people. She saved my life a few times, asking how she would live without me. And now… tears slipped down Katy’s cheeks. You know. Fuck Donald Trump. Fuck him with a rusty steel encrusted dildo. Anyway, I mean, before all this started, Dani, her husband George, my husband Kevin, and my parents would go to my mom’s house and spend hours talking and laughing and playing games. Before… well, Mother’s Day of 2015 I guess was the time before things started to go wrong. My sister was pregnant then, so she and I didn’t drink but everyone else had a lot of wine. Kevin wasn’t drunk, because he can hold his alcohol. Being nearly 500 pounds helps with that, I guess. But he wasn’t drunk. My parents and George were. And we all got in the pool to play water volleyball. My parents have a pool in their backyard. But they mostly use it for 30 minutes a day to exercise, and don’t really go to play in it anymore. But, that day we did. We had a pink volleyball. We played girls against boys, and since most of the boys were drunk, and most of the girls were sober, we won easily. 

Dani said she loved being in the pool because it took the extra weight off her knees and hips. She had a pretty rough pregnancy with Adam. She never stopped having morning sickness. And she had a migraine that didn’t go away for a week and all she could take was Tylenol, which doesn’t help migraines at all really. 

The other thing I remember about that day was George swearing. Dani told him that he owed a dollar to the penalty jar. I heard him swear a few more times in his life, but from the time she announced her pregnancy until it happened, I never heard her swear again. She said she wouldn’t swear once she had kids, and she lived up to that. I feel bad now when I swear in front of her kids. But I haven’t been able to stop. George never could either. 

George was blind. That Mother’s Day he had just gotten a job working for the federal government. He was teaching blind people to use computers, and he used to refer to himself as a tech god. He and Dani both were. Tech Gods that is. Dani was a programmer, and she was really good at what she did. She worked from home 4 days a week and made big bucks. I mean like $500,000 a year. She didn’t want for anything. I guess only one of us could really succeed at anything. But she was successful. She and George met at Georgia Tech. They were both computer science majors. Maybe I should have done that instead of joining the army. But, hindsight. 

Kevin likes computers, too, but hates programming, which he said he never quite got the hang of. He works tech support for a company that caters to churches. He can fix just about anything, but he can’t program, which is where the money is. 

I’d been on disability for 10 years by that point, and my parents had just retired. They were 65 and they’d started traveling the world. They went to Turkey and Greece on a cruise, then they went to Hawaii. My mother went to visit all her old high school and college friends around the country. She was constantly gone. I wish I thought there was any chance I’d get to do that when I retire. I mean, I guess I am retired, but when I’m old. When my husband retires. 

Doctor Hoffman interrupted. “Tell me what you did with yourself all day? What was a typical day like for you?” 

Well. I didn’t do much, to be honest. I was in the PRRC, which, I don’t know if they reopened that or not, but it used to be a VA run program for schizophrenic and bipolar veterans. I went to them daily, or whenever I could wake up. They did CBT therapy, and interpersonal training. There was a peer there, too, and she did a lot of work on addiction recovery. Not that I ever needed that, but it was good for a lot of people. So, I did that in the mornings, and then I would read people’s blogs. It was perpetually my goal to reply to one in every four blogs, but I almost never hit that goal. I still read all these blogs every day. A lot of people still keep them. Some of them have gone silent, and I guess I’ll never know if they survived the disaster or not, or if they were taken away during the repeat. One of my friends was a trans-man, and he hasn’t updated in years. He used to update daily, multiple times per day. I’m afraid he may be gone. But then again he might be in hiding, and unwilling to admit who he is online anymore. I guess I’ll probably never know. And that sucks. 

After reading blogs I spent a lot of time on a political message board called Yet Another Politics Board. There was a core group of five of us. My best friend in the entire world was on that board. His name was Victor. We had been friends for ten years before the election, but had never met in person. He helped me a lot with my schizophrenia. I mean, whenever I was afraid of something, he would come up with a way to calm me. So I was afraid of black shadows, and he told me they were dreams. I was afraid of vampires and he told me I could control them with my mind, which turned out to be true. He gave me a stone, a sun stone, that he told me would allow me to control them, and prevent them from hurting me as long as I touched it once a month. So I did that, I’ve done that for years. And for the most part it has allowed me an amount of control I never had before. It stops me from going… well it stops what happened last year from happening on a regular basis. 

Then there was Norman, the only other really active liberal. He was a biology professor in Massachusetts. He was pretty nice. He was an administrator at the board, although he was always hesitant to act because the board owner kept accusing him of moderating with bias. The conservatives complained a lot about him, but they complained a lot about everything. He was pretty moderate, honestly, even though the conservatives constantly accused him of being on the far left. He was one of the few people who knew how sick I was, because if I was going to post something crazy, it would be late at night, and he was always up until 4am. He’d delete the threads so no one except the admin could see it. 

One of the other admin was Cooter. Just like the nickname suggests, he was a bit of a redneck. He was from Mississippi. He was a conservative, but not a crazy conservative. I mean, he voted for Johnson. He frequently seemed reasonable, even though he thought Obama was stupid. 

Then there was James, James was the far right. He voted for Trump twice, first in the California primary and then in the election. And he was mean. He was constantly getting warned for making fun of me for being schizophrenic. He’d accuse me of having caretakers, which was funny because he had muscular dystrophy and had a caretaker, while I did not have one. He would literally defend a child molester over a liberal. Diane, the owner, was constantly threatening to ban him permanently, but never actually did. 

The other regular was Mark, who was also far right. Once, many years ago, he was pretty sane and a good adversary, but as he got older and drunker he got meaner and meaner, and stupider and stupider. Years ago he’d occasionally give me money when I needed it, hundreds of dollars. He even offered my husband a job if we could move to Boston. But, like I said, he got meaner and stupider, and by now I just have him on ignore so I can’t see his posts anymore. They’re never worth reading. I keep him on Facebook for nostalgia’s sake but then again I never read Facebook anymore, so I don’t see him. But back in 2015 I was still paying attention to him. I still had hope, I guess. But if the last 4 years didn’t teach him, nothing will. There were other people who dropped in, even some regulars, but those were the main 5 posters. 

In addition to YAP, there was sluggy squad. Sluggy is a web comic, but I never read it. Instead I was invited to the chatroom by Kiki. She and Drake had just gone to the national socialist conference, and the only other member was Nick, who was Canadian. Kiki was my friend from grad school. She was my age, though she was in undergrad at the same school, and we used to meet together with all the nerds and play card games at lunch. The others, I dunno, they’ve been in my life a long time, and I missed Drake when Trump took him. But really, they’re just like extras in my life. But anyway, everyone in that chat room was a socialist, so they were quickly in danger. 

So that was pretty much my daily life. I talked to all these people online, and after February of 2016 I went to the PRRC. I slept from 3am to 3pm every day, if I could sleep at all. I hated that, and actually saw a sleep therapist for it, but she kept trying sleep restriction, and I’d just collapse and fall asleep in the middle of every day if I tried to wake up at reasonable hours. Plus I’d hallucinate, if I didn’t fall asleep, instead of every few weeks, it was every day. So I quickly gave up on sleep therapy and decided I was better off just sleeping whenever I could get sleep.

Alright, Dr Hoffman said, well, I don't think we’ll make any changes to your meds. I look forward to continuing this. I’ll see you in a month, okay?


	2. Chapter 2

It was only half an hour until her appointment with her new psychologist, so she stayed in the waiting room and rocked back and forth. Of course, the last appointment had been painless enough, but to change psychologists? She loved her previous psychologist, and she had had so many bad experiences with VA psychologists. This could go so badly, or so well, and there was absolutely no way to predict which would happen. She sat and rocked for the next half an hour quietly crying because she couldn’t text Dani to discuss events. 

Half an hour later, her old psychologist walked out the door and called her name. She smiled on seeing him. “You remember me,” he stated the obvious. She smiled, “yes.”  
“I’m in a new room. It’s a left turn here.” he said, guiding her from behind as she made her way back through the maze. “do you like white chocolate?” he asked as they turned into his office. “My favorite.” she replied, and he gestured to a little bowl of kisses. She took two. 

So the last time we talked, you were doing better. You were in the PRRC, and things were going well. She nodded. I understand things went downhill after that. “Didn’t they for everyone?” she asked. He agreed. Nearly all his clients had major problems during the Trump presidency. Many became homeless. Those who were less than 100% disabled got jobs, but many of them got sicker and couldn’t handle it. Katy was 100% disabled, but she had gotten a job, and things had predictably gone downhill.  
“Let’s backup first. What did an average episode look like for you? What did you experience when people told you that wasn’t normal?”  
Well, I knew I was having issues when my first instinct was to tell Victor what was going on. No one else would take me seriously, and I knew that so I was able to confine myself to just telling Victor. Occasionally it went badly and I told someone else. I told Norman occasionally, and he would always tell me to take my meds and go to sleep. Victor would try to make it so I wasn’t afraid anymore. 

In a typical episode, I would see vampires. They were really more amorphous black shadows with red eyes. They had red eyes because Victor told me they did. They didn’t originally, but he had glowing yellow eyes in his avatar and I got afraid of him once, so he told me that vampire eyes glowed red and from then on they did. But anyway, I saw these vampires and I was afraid of them. They’d be outside my window though, and Victor told me I could make them disappear. So I put a portal at my window, and I would tell the vampires to go to Victor. He would tell me that any that went his way died, when I asked him if he saw the vampires I sent. So they would die, and I would feel more in control. 

I would also see black shadows that I called the black things. But Victor told me they were dreams, and that they just wanted to be seen and experienced. I would blame them every time I had a bad dream, but he told me they could be good dreams, too, and then I would always dream when I saw them, which was weird because I don’t dream often. I guess it’s the sleep apnea but I rarely dream. So I would see either of these things, and I would become afraid, and panic. I would private message Victor, and tell him about them, and he would tell me how to calm myself, and I would calm down. But I’d still see things. 

Oh I guess even more commonly than that was someone trying to read my mind. I could feel it in my head like a tingly feeling in my head. Victor would tell me it was just God, and I wasn’t afraid of God trying to read my thoughts since I figured he was benevolent. And it happened all the time. That was actually what got me diagnosed. I told Doctor Dooley about that, and she said I wasn’t just bipolar but was schizoaffective, and that it wouldn’t change anything with the VA which I guess it didn’t. I was already on an antipsychotic, and a fairly high dose of them, so I just continued on that, and I kept having intermittent breakthrough episodes, but there seems to be nothing that could be done about it except to try to keep me calm through it.

So anyway, I guess I would just see these vampires. And I would set up a portal, and then I’d private message Victor, and tell him that I had sent him vampires. He would tell me they were all dead, and I would thank him, and leave him alone until the next episode. This was happening about every two weeks. Sometimes it would happen more frequently, and sometimes it would happen less frequently. I could see sometimes how long it had been since I PMed Victor, and would comment on it, but of course by the time I was commenting on it, there was always another episode. The mind reading is what got me in trouble with the kids at school. I really thought the kids were reading my mind. I forgot all about God. 

I have a lucky stone that keeps me safe from vampires. It gives me sun power even in the night and I can … well vampires are allergic to the sun, so they are allergic to me. And I can keep them away from me. It’s the same power Victor was using to keep me safe before he gave me the stone. 

I don’t know. I don’t like talking about this. A lot of times I feel weird when I do. I mean I know you’re a psychologist, so I’m supposed to talk about this with you, and maybe I will later when I get more comfortable, but right now I want this conversation to change. Let’s talk about something else. 

OK he agreed. He always agreed. Let’s talk about something that makes you happy. When do you remember being really happy?

Oh that’s easy. When Kevin, Shayna and I went to Gatlinburg back in 2015. That was before Trump announced he’d be running for president, so there was literally nothing to worry about in the world, and we had a great time there. We went on two different driving trails through the Smoky Mountain national park, and we saw a bear, and seven deer, and a turkey. Then we went into Pigeon Forge and saw a dinner play. It was a lumberjack competition, and they did different ways of sawing wood, and walking on lumber in water, and there were dog shows and a few times when they called people out of the audience to try things. It was a lot of fun. 

Shayna and I went down and sat in a hot tub every night, and just sat there and chatted. I saw her on average once a year after grad school ended, but we always picked right back up where we left off. It was one of those friendships, you know. I love her to death. She lives in Israel now. Her grandfather was a Holocaust survivor, and as soon as the government started registering Muslims she and her whole family left the country for Israel. She was one of the smart ones who got away quickly. I haven’t seen her since I left Jerusalem. 

But I was talking about Gatlinburg. We rode some horses one day, and the guy who was leading the tour kept making fun of me for looking nervous. I really couldn’t help it. I was really nervous the whole time, especially because my horse kept getting really slow, and then Shayna’s horse would stick his nose in my horse’s butt, and then my horse would kick at Shayna’s horse. I mean, I love horses, but this horse would not cooperate with me. Then we finished, and I couldn’t figure out how to get off the horse. I tried to swing my leg behind me, but I couldn’t get it over the horse’s butt. I mean I know now that you’re supposed to swing your leg forward. At the time I didn’t know it. And we were really happy that year. Dani and George couldn’t go. They own a timeshare and we were able to use that to get a two room condo in the mountains. It was great. 

Maybe I was happy other times in 2015 and 2016, but after January 20, 2017, I was never happy again. Dr Hoffman says that perhaps I’ll learn to be happy again, but he doesn’t want to medicate grief away. He’s concerned that if I try that I’ll never come to terms with Dani’s death. He’s probably right. I probably wouldn’t ever come to terms with her death if I felt all right. But, damn, do I feel horrible, and I know it’s only been a few months and we’re all still in shock from that event, but, I feel like I’ll never know happiness without my sister. Like I’ll never be okay again. Half of me is gone. Damn, now I’m not happy again. I know the goal was to talk about something that made me happy, and traveling with Shayna did make me happy. But remembering that it was because of Dani and George makes me sad. 

Happy. I can remember happy. June 1, 2015 my nephew Adam was born. Dani and George were so proud of him. He was so tiny. I mean he was a big baby at almost 8 pounds, but even so when I held him I was so afraid that I was going to break him. And whenever he was taken away from his mother he made this little “eh!” sound. He didn’t cry, but he just said “eh” until he was back with his mother. It was adorable. I love that kid. I love him to death. And unlike our nephews on Kevin’s side of the family, Dani actually let us be involved in raising this one, babysitting and coming over for birthdays and events and things. He’s 5 now, and in kindergarten. Great kid. That was a really happy event in all of our lives. 

That was a really good day. Adam was born at 9 at night, but before that, my friend Elizabeth left her abusive ex husband, and moved into a battered women’s shelter. She asked me for my phone number so that if she could get housing assistance she’d have a reference for them. So I was glad to see her leave him, too. He’d been in jail twice for beating either her or his girlfriend. He stayed with the girlfriend when Elizabeth left, and as far as I know he’s continued to bounce in and out of jail ever since. When things started getting bad, he got himself arrested on purpose, so there would be a roof over his head. He figured it was easier than trying to work, I guess. He always used to talk about the work he would do, but then he’d give up, and not do anything about it. I was glad to see her out of there. 

The other good thing that happened that day is that Victor went to Ukraine. That meant that when he woke up at 6am, I was still awake for the night, and I got to talk to him almost every night. He brought his son with him, and they went on a road trip through the country. He told me every late night where they were and I was able to follow on a map. They did some cool stuff, like going to Kyivan Rus park, which has long been a dream of mine. But of course I never will, because going all the way to Ukraine just to see Kyivan Rus park is ridiculous. And I probably won’t ever go back to Russia because I feel like I’ve seen everything there is to see in Moscow and St Petersburg. So, that’s the only other way I’d wind up in Ukraine for a short time period is going off a Russian trip. I wanted to go when I went to Russia, but my summer program ended only a week before school started back up, so I couldn’t. I had to go home and move to a new apartment. 

Another happy thought is that I had a best friend named Aedan. We met in college. He was transgender. He was a young woman named Melissa when I was hanging out with him, and we were the only two female fighters in the barony. Thats… that’s a reference to a group called the society for creative anachronisms, which is also known as the SCA. It’s a nonprofit educational organization that runs internationally. We do medieval martial arts, arts, cooking, sewing, and events. It’s basically how we play, I guess. So, Aedan and I were fighters, that’s broadswords, and it’s a full contact sport, you get bruises and hit each other full strength with wooden swords. I loved it, but my back and knees are too bad to keep doing it now, which is probably my number one regret in life as far as my medical condition goes. I don’t remember why I was just thinking of Aedan. We used to chat daily on the internet. and he used to show me all his art projects. He was a really good artist, unlike me, even though I always was trying for more and more art type things. I was always jealous of him. But he was always depressed, and he didn’t have medical insurance so he couldn’t take antidepressants, or even antipsychotics for his bipolar disorder. He worked walking dogs for a living, even though he had a degree in teaching. No one would hire a trans man for a teaching job. So all that college was a waste. When he came out to his mother he told her that she could choose between having a dead daughter or a living son. The bitch asked for time to decide, and then when she finally decided she’d rather have him alive, she asked him, “why did you kill my daughter?” so he really had no support as an adult. When his grandfather died the only thing he got in the will was a gun with instructions to use it to put his family out of their misery. He almost did, but then he decided to sell the gun. People are shitty. 

Damn, I’m not being very happy again. I seem to have gotten depressed again. I wasn’t depressed for a few years before the election. I was actually a pretty happy go lucky person for about 3 years. I guess Trump managed to kill that, too. It’s just hard. I wish I could get that back. 

That was the end of sanity though. Trump announced his candidacy that month, and even though I never thought he could win, that was really the end of everything, wasn’t it? 

“I guess so,” Doctor Bell answered sadly. We’re just about out of time for the day though. I want to see you again soon. Say in about a week? We can talk about the rest of the time you were happy - that 2015 to 2016 year. I’d like to hear how your life was at the time you want your life to resemble again. Then maybe we can work on getting back there, even with your loss, and the additions to your life. We’ll eventually have to talk about your life for the past four years. I know it’s tough. It’s tough for everybody, but it’s important. When we send people to the Trauma Recovery Program the first thing they ask them is “what happened.” We want you to be able to answer that question also. 

Katy frowned. The last 4 years were not only terrible, they were a bit embarrassing as well. Everything she had tried to do to cope with events that happened to her had failed. Literally the only good thing to happen to her was that she finally met Victor in person, but she had to go all the way to Israel to do that. 

She stood up, and took another chocolate as she walked out the door and through the maze of doctors’ offices. Doctor Bell walked a step behind her, telling her which way to turn, and then reminded her to make another appointment for a week in the future to come back. She stopped at the secretary’s desk, and made the appointment. It was Exactly one week before she had to be back. She walked outside and found her car parked in one of the 40 handicap spots that surrounded the VA’s satellite hospital. She never understood why there were so many handicap spots at this doctors’ office building but only two at the main hospital. Someone apparently just bought too many of the signs and put them all up or something. They were usually all taken, however, so she couldn’t complain too much. Besides, she’d gotten handicap plates year before when she became 100% disabled and got her free license plates. She made the left turn onto the road, then merged onto the highway. She hated the highway merge in this area, because you merged into the left hand lane and she always had difficulty merging back to the right across 3 lanes of traffic. 

She got home and sent the babysitter, Jess, and Jess’ son who was also named Adam, home. Jess had been another friend in grad school. She had a good job working for a nonprofit that helped transgender youth in Atlanta, but when Trump started targeting trans people, the organization shut down in fear that he would use them to find people, and target them. Jess had never managed to find another job, and had eventually ended up babysitting for Dani and George on occasion when their parents were busy. When Katy and Kevin had adopted the children, they had kept Jess on as the babysitter even though the organization had reopened, and Jess was working in her old job again. The organization was open weekends, so Jess was off work Mondays and Tuesdays, so Katy was careful to put all her appointments on those two days so that Jess could babysit. It provided some kind of continuity for Adam. 

Katy jumped online and read her friends’ journals. She still had about 20 active journals. She read them now, smiling as one friend bought a house, and another friend posted pictures of a dog and her son’s horse playing with one another. Another friend was a special ed teacher who had lost her job when the government stopped providing education for the severely handicapped. She had tried to get a job teaching in the regular classroom, but failed. Just today she announced that she would be back in the special ed classroom at the same school she had to leave back in 2017. So it seemed like everyone had good news today, and Katy posted her good news too. 

My psychologist is back at the VA. I guess he wasn’t able to find a job while Trump was president, and when the VA reopened their doors, he was there to take his old patients back, at least those who survived. I’m really excited today to see him. I feel like even though I haven’t seen him in 4 years I don’t have to start again at the beginning. He knows at least something about me. So that’s my good news for the day. Also, the new psychiatrist seems responsive and positive, so I’m hopeful that things will work out. I’m so thankful for access to my meds again, I can’t even tell you. They’ll mail them to me, and I should have them within a week. Maybe then these voices in my head will shut up, and I can get on with the business of healing. 

It was a short entry, compared to what she was used to writing, but Dani’s daughter, Emma was crying, and Adam was making noises that he was hungry. Kevin came home at around the same time. He sat at the head of the table, and Katy brought Emma and Adam to the table. It was Kevin’s turn to feed Emma, so Katy gave him a can of Gerber’s and then pulled the ranchy potato chicken out of the crock pot. She served half of it to Kevin, and split the rest with Adam. He wasn’t quite proficient in the use of a knife and fork yet, but the meat was so tender you could cut it with the side of your fork, so she showed Adam how to do this, and then ate her own food. Her favorite meal was always “anything simple to throw in the crock pot” and this was the simplest. It consisted of two jars of ranch dressing, three chicken breasts, and three potatoes. 

After dinner was bath time for the kids, and then time to read a story and bed time. Exhausted and depressed, Katy and Kevin slipped into bed moments after the children did.


	3. Chapter 3

The days moved along and soon it was Monday again. Jess came over, and Katy told her that Adam would be home from kindergarten at 3:10, and would need to be picked up from the bus stop. Then she left and drove to Decatur to the VA satellite clinic. 

She arrived at 2:50, so she waited another 10 minutes, and at precisely 3pm, Dr Bell came back for her and took her back to his office. “how was your week?” he asked her. She shrugged. It was just another week. “I have dark chocolate this week.” he told her “do you like it” She shrugged again. “It’s not my favorite.” She took a piece anyway, and sucked on it until it dissolved in her mouth. “What’s your goal this week?” he asked her, surprising her a little with the question, since that was normally the question the PRRC asked her, and not her private doctor. Of course, she didn’t go to the PRRC anymore, having a baby to take care of. Maybe when Emma went to kindergarten, she could go back. 

I want to comment on one in four blog posts my friends write, and then I want to not break the baby. The thing about commenting on her friends’ blog posts had been her goal since she had been in the PRRC back in 2016. She’d made strides towards doing it, but had never been completely successful. Not breaking the baby was new, and mostly a joke anyway. She didn’t think she was going to break the baby, Emma just always seemed so fragile and tiny, like she could break easily. As if Katy would pick her up and break all her ribs just by holding her. But of course if it were that easy to break a baby, none would survive. They simply had to be hardier than they appeared. So Katy smiled bravely. “Can I help you with either of these goals?” Dr Bell asked but she shook her head. Not unless you know how to know what to say to people. She laughed because they had tried to work on this before, and it just never worked. She’d worked on it with the social worker at PRRC years before, but it never stuck. It would always seem to be going well, but then she’d be back chewing on her tongue wishing she could speak immediately after the good sessions with professionals. She didn’t know what was wrong. It was like she could talk to doctors, but no one else. She shook her head again, “I kind of just want to do the trauma processing thing. I want to make things okay again. I don’t want Adam and Emma growing up remembering me crying every day, and that’s what I’m afraid is going to happen. 

“OK. Well then let’s talk about Trump. When did you first hear he was going to run for president?” 

That’s easy. I was completely addicted to a political message board called YAP. I heard about it as soon as it happened. Everyone thought it was a joke though. No one seriously thought he could become president. Even when polls showed him way ahead in the primaries, no one thought he would win. I remember I was one of the first to get nervous and my friend Norman told me not to worry because soon people would start dropping out, and the establishment republicans would fall in line behind one non-Trump candidate. Certainly we’d have an election between Hillary and Jeb. I joked that the next thing we knew we’d have an election between Chelsea Clinton and the Bush girl for president, and it would be the 2000 election all over again, just polished up for a new generation. 

I only knew one person voting for Trump, and that was this asshole named Roddy. He was big on one liners that looked like they could be nonsense, but could also be insulting things about other posters. He really liked to post about vampires with me, whether just to make fun of me or to see if he could trigger me, I’m not sure. But he was the only one I knew who actually wanted Trump, and everyone thought he was stupid. Not for wanting Trump but because his posts rarely made any sense. People would joke about him, just like “oh look more nonsense from Roddy.” I guess, I kind of thought it was all stupid people voting for Trump, and surely half of America wasn’t stupid, right? I guess half of America has double digit IQs though. That’s depressing. 

But even James and Mark didn’t want to vote for the guy. James was a Cruz man, but living in California, Trump was the only republican left to vote for by the time their election came around. So he voted for Trump. But he was a Cruz man, which was weird, because he wasn’t particularly religious. I mean we had religious nuts on the board, but James wasn’t one of them. And Mark voted for Rubio. He wanted the establishment candidate, which I should note because he went all-in for Trump. But I guess that was just him getting crazier as he got older. And he voted in Massachusetts, which Trump won by a lot but Rubio came in second. I don’t know. I was surprised Trump did so well in Massachusetts. Apparently so were a lot of people. 

But, it didn’t even seem important, because at the time, I was more worried about Bernie Sanders. I really wanted him to win. I hated Hillary, and didn’t want to see her become president, and I saw Bernie as our best chance. So I was voting for Bernie, and it caused a bit of stress because Victor kept calling Berners “stupid” and “idiots” and the like. He and Norman both voted for Hillary in the primary. I hated that Victor apparently thought I was an idiot. Even though he never said it directly, he would just say things like “some people want Bernie Sanders to win. They’re idiots.” He never outright called me an idiot to my face, and I appreciated that because that’s his worst insult, to say someone is stupid. He says it a lot to a lot of people, but never me. 

But even that wasn’t the big story. I mean, we were arguing over an article someone posted stating that immigrants were good for the country. Victor was an immigrant, and he was also filthy stinking rich. I mean, richer than Dani. 

At the mention of her sister Katy sighed again, but quickly moved on. 

He had four kids, and bought them each a car as they turned 16 or 18 depending on their grades, and nice cars too. So, I don’t know my point is he was clearly good for our economy. But he wasn’t born here. He was born in the Soviet Union, in Ukraine. When he was 17 he wrote a pro Western paper, and angered his teachers and his government, so his mother moved the family to Israel. Then he lived there for a year, but then Saddam Hussein was bombing Israel, and he moved to the United States, in New York City. He worked under the table for $2 an hour for a while, but not long. Just until his mother could get a visa and secure work working as a translator, which is what she had done in Ukraine, too. So then Victor went to NYU and to grad school at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He stayed in Western Massachusetts with his wife, and eventually four kids. When I met him his eldest was seven and his youngest was two, and he was making $60k a year as a programmer at his alma mater. But he quickly got another job making a bit more, and within a few years had a succession of better and better jobs until he was rich. So all the people claiming immigrants were bad for our economy was a personal issue with Victor, and he got mean during some of those debates. I mean, he got mean all the time anyway, with anyone he thought was stupid, but he was in rare form in those debates. I liked watching him get mean though, because in general the people he was mean to were mean to me, and I was too meek to get revenge myself, so I sort of felt good when Victor would get revenge for me. 

I was pretty relaxed about the whole thing. I was certain Trump couldn’t win the primaries, never mind the presidency. So Kevin and I went to Hilton Head for our anniversary. We stayed in a hotel paid for off my credit card points, and it was a mile or so to the beach, so he had to drive me there. He didn’t like the beach himself. He hates water and he hates sand, so the beach is not for him. But, I loved it, so I went and it was so hot I wound up with the worst sunburn of my life. 

We went on a dinner cruise where they served us brisket, shrimp and grits, potatoes, bread, and wine. We saw some dolphins playing along the side of the ship, and talked for like three hours. It was great, and we were totally relaxed. Our world wasn’t ending. It just seemed like any other time. I’d like to do it again one day, if we can ever afford it, and Kevin ever has enough days to take off work again. But that’s what was important. Not Trump. Not politics at all. I was spending time with my family, and loving them. 

We had another dinner at my mother’s house, for George’s birthday. We had steaks, and potatoes, and played with Adam in the pool. He loved it by the way. So, I don’t know. He was a funny kid. He hated baths, but getting in the pool was a treat. He had just managed to hold his head up straight on his own, so we were able to put him in a floating raft, and allow him to float around. George kept splashing saying “where is he? where is he?” just joking around with him but then he would find him and kiss him, and hold him until my mom wanted time with her grand baby. It was great fun. Kevin was the only one who stayed out of the water. He hates the water, which is funny because he always takes hour long showers, but he says both are things he learned in the navy - hating the water, and appreciating the long shower when you can get it. So, he stayed out of the water while the rest of us played with Adam. 

The next day, Dani, my dad, and I all went to a Jimmy Buffett concert. It was great. He sang all my favorite songs, and we sang and danced. It was kind of funny because as we were walking in, my dad said, “it seems like there are people of all ages here.” Dani and I both laughed and said, “dad we’re the youngest people here by ten years.” And then just to disprove our assertion, a five year old ran by kicking me in the legs and tripping as he did so. Dad bought Dani a beer, and me a lemonade with a little umbrella in it. He was so tired on the way home that he almost went up I-75 instead of I-85 when the two roads split. It’s a confusing intersection, but certainly he has lived here long enough to know how to do it by now. But it was almost midnight, and he is used to going to bed around 9 so I guess he was just tired. But that’s what my life is like. I didn’t know everything was going to collapse within the next five years. No one did. No one saw this coming. 

It was the next day after the concert that gay marriage became legal throughout the country. Kevin knew I’d be excited, so he woke me up to tell me when it happened. I smiled, but rolled over and went back to sleep. Then when I woke up for real, I got on YAP and saw it all over the place. Gay marriage is legal. Curtis was upset but of course he was always going to be. He was such a bigot. He was the one who started mangling LGBT into GayBLT until Diane shut him down based on the rule against mangling group names on the board. So the liberals were all celebrating the Supreme Court, and the conservatives were all talking about activist judges legislating from the bench, and we were divided based on our position on gay marriage, which, actually, believe it or not, Mark was on the liberal side. I guess living in Cambridge, he had enough gay friends who had convinced him on their need to get married. Or maybe living in Massachusetts where it had been legal for years, he had gotten used to it. But whatever the case may be, he was in favor of gay marriage. It was just Curtis, James and Didy who were really against it at the time. 

Politics, and hockey were equally important. It was the off season, but Dani’s favorite team, the Washington Capitals had acquired an olympic star named TJ Oshie. When his skill was combined with previous star Alexander Ovechkin’s scoring talent, it really looked like it might be the Cap’s year that year. Unfortunately, it wasn’t to be, and Kevin’s Blackhawks took the cup, but I guess if the Caps couldn’t get it, and the Av’s didn’t even make the post season, I don’t mind the Hawks winning. It makes my husband happy, so it makes me happy, too. Dani was all excited about the trade, though. 

Life went on for the next month until the first presidential debate. My dad and my sister thought that Trump had hurt himself in the debate, but polls kept coming out saying he was winning, and I predicted he’d win. Everyone told me I was crazy and paranoid. It was a universal opinion. But I wasn’t so crazy that time, was I? He said some crazy things, and he never had a policy position to hold, and if it had been any one else, and the republican party hadn’t been so crazy this year, it would have hurt him, but it only seemed to help him. I saw immediately what was going to happen. Well, that’s not true.I thought Hillary would beat him, but I thought he might become the nominee. Norman and Victor joined Dani and Dad in telling me that I was nuts. 

There was one group of people I spent time with who took the Trump threat seriously, and that was the people from my synagogue. Trump mentioned making muslims register, and we all remember the last time a country made its non-Christian citizens register. People passed around a photo of three Holocaust survivors showing their identity numbers tattooed on their arms with the caption “Just wanted to remind you what registering non-Christians looks like.” We were nervous. You know, some people thought he might extend the registrations to us. Others knew it would always stay with the Muslims, but either way you were nervous about it, because you knew muslims; you had muslim friends. If you didn’t know muslims, our synagogue had some come visit every year around Thanksgiving for an ecumenical service. So that was scary for us. Everyone was talking about it the next Friday when I went to services. Laurie and her 13 year old daughter Alyssa Rose were the people I usually sat next to, and they were talking about it. Laurie said if Trump started registering Muslims, she’d move to Israel. I guess she was one of the smart ones, because we saw it coming. We know what singling out religious minorities looks like. But the two rabbis weren’t talking about that. It wasn’t a serious threat because certainly Trump wouldn’t win the primaries, and if he did, surely Hillary would win the presidency. So they talked about Moses’ eyes being unclouded by age, and how rare that would have been during biblical times. 

We had two rabbis. Rabbi Lebow, and Rabbi Boxt. Rabbi Lebow was a conservative, and Rabbi Boxt made me look conservative he was so liberal. Of course, they couldn’t discuss politics from the bimah, but you knew what they thought if you hung around long enough. Rabbi Lebow had started the congregation but he was getting ready to retire, and Rabbi Boxt was about my age, and had just graduated from rabbinical school where he went a little late in life, after a collection ofodd jobs that would rival my own. 

We talked a little about politics. We generally avoid it because both Dani and I are so liberal, and dad is so conservative. But my dad brought up politics, and we talked for a while. Dad was voting for Cruz. George was voting for Jeb. My mom was voting for Hillary, and Dani and I were both voting for Bernie. My mom really surprised me. Even though she had voted twice for Obama, I didn’t think she was generally a democrat, so I was surprised to learn she could vote in the democratic primary. Kevin said he wasn’t going to vote, but that didn’t surprise me. He claimed he wanted to like Bernie Sanders, but he really couldn’t justify voting for someone who didn’t have a strong NRA rating and even though Bernie’s was stronger than Hillary’s he didn’t think he could vote for him. I guess it wouldn’t have mattered since Georgia is a winner-take-all state, and Bernie didn’t even come close to winning Georgia. 

I was still having episodes every 2-3 weeks but I decided to try an experiment and instead of telling Victor about each episode, I would just private message him and tell him something about my life. I would just say, “I really enjoyed my photography class today. I took a picture of a grave yard and I’m proud of myself for going into the grave yard without freaking out about black things or ghosts or anything.” and he would respond “that’s great - keep it up” and I’d be fine again as soon as I heard from him, which I think made helping me less tedious for him. Plus, it made me feel less stupid, so it helped us both. I wouldn’t accidentally trigger myself by rereading our previous conversation and seeing a description of the vampires there or something because if I reread it it looked like a normal conversation. It seemed to work. I felt better than I ever have before. I should try that again. 

So, I sometimes go to events off of meetup.com. They basically let you decide what your interests are and then provide you with groups of people who match those interests. Dani and I used to go to hockey meetups, in fact, thats where she was when it happened. But I also go to meetups for the mentally ill called mental health and wellness Atlanta. The organizer is Laura, a borderline personality disorder girl with anorexia. So that October, I went to one of the meetups and Laura wasn’t there, but there were a few familiar faces, and then there was this new woman who apparently thought we were a process group, because she wanted us to go around in a circle an say what we were dealing with and how we were doing that day, and basically, the kinds of stuff you’d do in group therapy or something. Then, to get us started, she started talking about her flatulence. Which one mention of it might have been fine, but she ended up mentioning it every five minutes for the rest of the time the group met. I have no idea why she thought anyone might care. Why did I even bring this up, I have no idea. But she might be the most obnoxious person I’ve ever had the misfortune to meet in person. And she was more important to me than politics for weeks. Especially when she showed up again at the next meeting, but fortunately, Laura was at the next meeting, and managed to reign her in a little. We met at a coffee shop called chocolate coffee. I wasn’t a fan of any of their warm drinks so I always had a mango smoothie when we went there, and it was really good. It was still warm that October, although I had been wearing sweatshirts for about a week. I know because I posted about it on Facebook, and I can see that in my throwback Thursday app I have on my phone. So, I don’t know. I had a mango drink, and talked to these people about everything other than our mental illnesses. And tried to ignore flatulence girl. 

It was the next month that I started to think I might be in trouble. That was when that disabled reporter asked Trump a question and Trump replied by making retard hands and chopping at his chest and saying “I don’t know what my hands are doing, drr, I’m a retard.” So, I thought that maybe the disabled would be in trouble if Trump got elected, but apparently I was the only one who saw it. Everyone else was just going on with their life. I mentioned my fears to Victor, and he said that the behavior was disgusting, but I shouldn’t worry about it. After all, Trump wasn’t going to win, and even if he did, the ADA would protect me. There was nothing to panic about. Well I wasn’t really panicked yet, but I was nervous. But I let Victor calm me, and moved on with my life. 

In December, Dani invited me to an Atlanta Hockey Fans meetup. It was in downtown Atlanta, at a bar we tried to go to monthly. I don’t know how we both wound up being hockey fans. She started liking hockey in grad school in Washington DC, and I started in college at Colorado College. We didn’t grow up with it, but we both ended up being fans, and fans of different teams. At any rate, that day her team was playing against my team, and we went to watch it with Keith and Jordan and Josh. Her team won, but that wasn’t the big news of the night. The big news was that Adam had learned to roll over, and was moving himself around the house by rolling around. The month prior he had learned to sit up, so he could now grab things on the coffee table, and they had to be careful. 

Dani and George had planned to take him to meet his great-grandfather in January, but they never quite made it. On December 17th, he was moved to hospice care, and on December 26th he died. He was 93 years old, and had Alzheimer’s, and had, in fact, had it for many years. He didn’t remember who any of us were, except for my mother. But the last time she went to visit him, he told her, “my daughter is coming to visit me today.”   
“Dad, I am your daughter” she replied.   
He looked at her and said, “how old are you?”   
“65”  
“How did you get to be 63?” he asked, which I guess he was expecting a little girl to come because the whole time he was in the retirement home, he thought he lived on the ship bringing him home from world war two. He regularly invited people to go play table tennis with him on deck, then he would stand up from his wheel chair, and not be able to move, and an alarm would go off, and the nurses would come and settle him back into his chair, and he’d forget what he was going to do anyway. He didn’t know she had children, and he certainly didn’t know those children were old enough to have children of their own, so going down there with Adam probably would have just upset him, but Dani wanted them to meet. It’s a moot point anyway, since he died Christmas night, and was found dead in his bed on the 26th. 

The night he died, I forgot both doses of my meds, and ended up with a voice chattering away in my head. It told me that Victor was hurt, and I tried to convince it that a voice in my head couldn’t have information that I didn’t have access to, but it told me it had spoken to the voices in Victor’s head, and knew that Victor was hurt. I needed to go home and contact Victor as soon as possible. Of course when I got home, I messaged Victor, and he replied that I was fine, and told me to take my meds now and try to sleep. So I did that, and it helped a lot, the next morning I felt fine, at least until the nursing home tried to call me, and I called my mother who told me my grandfather was dead. I expected it since he was in hospice, but also I kind of expected him to never die, since he kept not dying. 

At the thought of people dying, she started crying again. It was just so unfair. “I think that’s enough for today.’ Dr Bell stopped her. She nodded and stood up. She drove home without thinking about it, and fed Adam and Emma. Jess had been kind enough to start cooking a lasagna for her so it was ready by 5 when they wanted to eat. Kevin got home from work, and ate by himself. He was late because of a meeting at work, but because he was the top performer he got a $50 visa gift card at work.


	4. Chapter 4

I learned something in 2016. There’s apparently a step between “I’m so depressed I can’t function” and “I’m depressed and can function.” It’s “I’m so depressed I can’t get out of bed but at least I have my cell phone out.” I hit that point for no apparent reason for the first time that January. Dr. Dooley called it mourning for my grandfather, and refused to change my meds around at all, and maybe that was true because I bounced back in February and never felt so terrible again until the last 4 years. But that was one day, and the very next day I was banned for a day from YAP, and I hated the admin who banned me for it. After a couple hours of being separated from Victor, I decided the the person separating us was obviously a vampire, because who else would want to separate us and prevent me from talking to Victor? It made perfect sense. So I yelled at Cooter, and told him I knew he was a vampire and I kill vampires and I would kill him too if he ever came near me. I ranted for over a page. Thankfully he never responded or did anything else to me. The next day, I felt better and sent him an apology. He said he knew I wasn’t feeling well and that’s why he didn’t respond. So I was thankful for that. But that was tough. I was convinced that I was under attack from the vampires, and I couldn’t reach the private message system to contact Victor. My emails often don’t get through to Victor, and we don’t know why, but that meant that I couldn’t reach him at all. And like I said, I was under attack. So I didn’t know what to do, and instead of dealing with it reasonably, by, say, calling Dani, or bothering Kevin, I responded by flipping out on Cooter. 

Less than a week later, Rabbi Boxt announced he was leading a trip to Israel. Dani and George volunteered to pay for the trip if I paid the airfare, and I had some money left over from a large settlement from the VA a year before. So we planned to go to Israel. The same day, Dani and George invited me to join them in their timeshare in Gatlinburg later that year. So that was a pretty good day for me, and even though maybe I should have been concerned about leaving the country only a week after my last melt down, I really wasn’t. It had been a few years since I was in the hospital and I was confident in my ability to hold it together as long as I had access to Victor. Of course, I’d bring my laptop with me on both of these trips, and life would be good. I’d share a room with Dani, and George and Adam would share a room in Israel. I was a little concerned about going with an infant, but I guess when the trip comes up you have to take the trip. 

Speaking of Adam, he had learned to crawl, and now nothing in the McDermith house was safe. He would get his little hands wherever they could go. He had discovered the hard way not to put a fork in the socket. Fortunately, given that George was blind, the house was always very neat and everything was always in its place. That had been a hard lesson for Dani to learn when they first got married, but she’d eventually adapted. George said it was a hard lesson for him to learn when he first went blind, but it was so necessary for him because he couldn’t just look around for things that were misplaced. He also couldn’t see if Adam grabbed something from its place and took it to do something naughty with it. It was problematic. 

Doctor Bell interrupted, “how often did you see Adam?” 

About twice to three times a week. I babysat sometimes, and there were weekly dinners with my mother, and Dani and Adam came to those, even though they used to be girls night, the baby was allowed to come. Then there were special events at my mom’s and sometimes we’d go over just to swim in the summers, or sit in the hot tub in the winters. 

How did babysitting go? I know you’re 100% disabled, so that might be hard for you. 

Yes, well I only volunteered to babysit at times when I’d normally be awake, and only for two or three hours a week, which I could handle. I mean, if I could find a job that was less than 5 hours a week, I’d totally do that, too. But such a job doesn’t really exist, and there’s nothing I can do that actually exists as a job. But I’d be the evening sitter, after Jess or my mom was done if something came up later. I often let Dani or George go to the bar to watch a sports game or something, since I preferred to watch the game at home, and they had the full cable package while I didn’t. I’d watch a lot of the Georgia Southern football games at their house while watching Adam and they’d watch a hockey game at the bar at the same time. Everybody won, and I’d get another $20 to $30 a week to boot, which helped a lot. I mean, I don’t mean to complain but we were constantly broke with all the debt we had managed to get into. So I think Dani and George let me babysit as a way of funneling me a little money and not making it look like charity. I certainly appreciated it. There were months we wouldn’t have gotten by at all without that extra $100. I’m not sure what we’re going to do now. 

We had a planning meeting for our Israel trip. Gil was supposed to find us the best airplane prices and then email us when we were leaving. He did, and we ordered our plane tickets. I wasn’t paying much attention when I did it, and I wound up clicking on the wrong time leaving Atlanta at noon instead of 10am, and then catching up with them at Kennedy. My return trip was completely different. I got the last one at the price Gil found, and they all wound up paying almost $500 more than I did, so for the 5 hours I had to sit at the airport, I just considered each one to save me $100. I would have felt better going with the rabbi and my family. But I wasn’t willing to pay the change fee, nor the higher prices to go with everyone else. Besides, we weren’t sitting together, so I figured I was just as well off as everyone else. Plus I’d get back to Atlanta at a time that wasn’t morning rush hour, so I could get a seat on the marta train, and have someone pick me up at the train station instead of having someone drive all the way down to the airport. 

OK, Doctor Bell stoped her. I guess we’re about out of time for today. Katy nodded. We were about to get to the election season, anyway, she noted.   
“We’ll get to that next time. Say a week?”   
She nodded assent and said, “yes, same time?”   
Doctor Bell agreed, and walked her out. 

She drove home. Jess wasn’t in a hurry, so she invited her to stay for dinner. The family was ordering a pizza, and Katy never finished her entire pizza. Kevin would eat an entire large pizza, leaving Katy to share one with Adam but between them they only ate three pieces of it. The rest went into the fridge, and never came out again. She may as well share it with Jess, who ate another two pieces. She gave the rest of the pizza to Jess to take home to her wife, Amanda. 

There was an SCA event that weekend. Katy hadn’t gone to one since Dani had died, but it would be good to see everyone. At least, everyone who was left. Plus it was a day event, in Decatur. It would be a short trip around 285 and inside the perimeter. She could take a class or two, and maybe eat the lunch smorgasbord before leaving and going home. Adam was old enough that he would almost certainly make a few friends, and Emily could be left with Kevin for the morning. She dug her garb out of the closet, and got dressed. Midwinter Arts and Sciences, or A&S, was an event that had historically gathered 150-200 people. Although she knew there would be fewer, because most people came from the Atlanta metro area, she was not prepared for the 50 people who were there. It was down to about a quarter of its usual size, and whether that was because people hadn’t survived the event, or because they had no money to continue playing in the SCA, she didn’t know. The answer was probably a combination of both things. 

Sebastian was teaching a class on making your armor look more accurate to the time period, or “more period” in the local slang. Katy sat in on the class, while Adam played with Tiffany’s children. Tiffany’s oldest was 16, and therefore old enough to babysit, so Katy didn’t worry about him not being directly under her control, and the girl seemed to really like Adam. After the class, was lunch. In previous years, they had laid out dozens of options on a table for those who paid to choose from. With so few people anticipated and prepaid at the event this year, there were only three options. One was a beef option, then there was chicken and fish. Katy took the beef and Adam took the chicken. There were about 10 other side dishes, and they each took a few bites of several of them. Katy sat next to Wanda. She hadn’t spoken to her since the event, and she was worried about Wanda’s daughter, a muslim woman who had been baroness of the city when Katy first moved back to Atlanta from California. Wanda told her Jadi had disappeared the first night they came for muslims, and had not survived. Katy decided the event was depressing enough, and left immediately following lunch. She and Adam got home around 2:00.


	5. Chapter 5

The following Monday she was back at Doctor Bell’s. He called her back at exactly 3pm, and offered her a chocolate kiss as always. The familiarity of it made her smile. Of course it made sense to try to open in a familiar and friendly manner. It would make people more talkative in general. It certainly worked on Katy. She looked, for the first time, at the walls around her. They were white with no art on them. There was a bookshelf against one wall, which provided the only color in the room. There were a few books on the shelf that had names like “Social Skills for Schizophrenics.” There was also a box of tissues. It seemed sterile. 

He crossed one leg over the other and smiled “all right Miss Skoog, I guess we were getting ready to talk about the election last time we left off.”  
“yeah” she muttered. “but it didn’t matter yet. It wasn’t a big deal because everyone assumed he’d lose the primary.” There was the New Hampshire Primary in February. The 9th I think. Trump and Kasich got delegates and Bernie won big. Almost no one in YAP was happy. I was, because I’d assumed that Bernie was going to fizzle out quickly, but this meant he had a chance. But Victor and Norman were unhappy with the Bernie victory, and James and Mark were unhappy with the Trump victory. But more than I was happy with Bernie’s victory I was happy because Dani called me and told me Adam had said “dada” to George. 

Also, that was the day I started at the PRRC. So I was excited that there was a chance I could be helped. I went to a class on making friends, and it got hijacked by someone who said he didn’t want to make friends because he didn’t want to trust anyone. The rest of the class was spent trying to convince him that making friends was a good idea and we never got around to how to do it. It pissed me off, because I have so much trouble making friends, and I don’t know how to do it, but I want to. 

I guess that should have been my warning though. Trump could win. Polls showed him winning, and he was winning. 

 

The next day was Super Tuesday. Clinton and Trump both won big. Norman and Victor were happier, but everyone else was depressed about it. I guess if you asked Norman and Victor with hindsight how they felt about it they wouldn’t say happy anymore. Norman was still telling me that republicans would coalesce behind an establishment candidate, but now that wasn’t Jeb, who dropped out. I watched the election results come in while reading YAP and refreshing every few minutes. A lot of other people seemed to be doing the same. Mark started to predict a Trump victory. He didn’t seem happy about it, but predicted he would mop the floor with Hillary. He thought enough people were unhappy with Washington that even democrats would fall behind Trump. I guess he was more aware than the rest of us. Four and eight years ago he had made such bad predictions that no one paid attention to him in 2016. 

Soon after, I babysat for Dani and George again as they went to an Atlanta Hockey Fans meetup. Afterwards we ended up talking about the horse farm the PRRC took me to. I had guided a horse around the arena that had come from Georgia Tech’s riding program, and Dani knew the horse from when she rode there. I guess the McDermiths had given up on finding Tyke again because they had adopted two new cats, Aaron and Aggie. They were tabby cats, Aaron was mostly gray and Aggie had a lot of orange in her coat. They were from the same litter, and had bonded with each other so they had to be adopted together. Aaron was a little stand-offish, but Aggie was very affectionate. I have those cats now. Aaron didn’t get along with my dogs for like a month but now we have an uneasy peace, and everyone explores the whole house. I was worried for a while though. 

Rabbi Boxt had us over to his house to discuss our Israel trip. He had us write papers saying what we were most looking forward to in going to Israel. I was most looking forward to having Israel be a place with memories for me, rather than just considering it a problem since it so constantly seems to be a problem in the news. Dani said she was most looking forward to seeing the Western Wall. George said he had been before, but he was excited to bring his son with him and help his son and wife experience the mitzvah of exploring Israel. 

That was sort of the end of the innocence; May 4th Trump became the presumptive nominee. Mark was suddenly 100% behind Trump talking about how Trump was going to mop the floor with Hillary and nothing Trump could do mattered to him. He’d make fun of disabled people, and Mark would cheer. He’d mock women and Mark would cheer. He talked about registering Muslims, and Mark cheered. After a couple days of this I decided his brain had been eaten by zombies, and that’s why he’d become so stupid. I became very afraid of him, and a few times lashed out at him. I tried to tell him that if he was still alive even though a zombie had his brain, he could get it back. He just needed a sun stone from Victor and then he would find the zombie that had his brain and kill it. He told me to take my meds so I took some klonopin. I tried to go to bed, but I couldn’t sleep, which was pretty normal for me. I stayed slightly afraid of Mark for the rest of the season, but I mean, James was just as bad he was cheering everything Trump did, too. But I expected it from James. Mark used to be smart, then as he got older and drunker he got meaner and stupider. And I just couldn’t deal with the fact that he got so much stupider. Norman deleted most of what I said about him before anyone saw it, but I was having serious problems with Mark. 

About a week later, Dani told me to take a break from YAP and come with her and George to Gatlinburg to their timeshare. We went there and spent a week. The internet at the timeshare broke so I had to use my cell phone for internet. So I was willing to do that to post on my journal but not read YAP. We mostly went through the trails in the forest, and saw some animals like a bear and a lot of deer. We also went to see some dinner theater. It had all you can eat fried chicken, biscuits, corn bread, and other side items. We ate a lot, and then the show started. It was about the McCoys and that feud they got in with the Hatfields. But it was simplified as though it were only a one generation feud. And it was a musical. As you came and left there were farm animals outside the building. They had some chickens, rabbits, and goats. We took some pictures of them as we left. Dani drove us back to Gatlinburg from Pigeon Forge. Then we watched TV until bed time. The next day was our last day and we did a driving trail. You can really see why it is called the Smoky Mountains. The fog rolling out across the mountains on days that it rains looks like the mountains are burning. On our way home we drove through Cherokee. I was uncomfortable with it because it was like all the surface cultural trappings were on sale for whoever was willing to pay for them. Besides that, they were made in China, so they weren’t even making jobs for Native Americans. We drove through back roads past a collection of flea markets and outdoor shops. George fell asleep on the trip home and Dani and I talked the whole time. 

We got home and it was a week after Mother’s Day, which we had left on, so my mom had us over for dinner. I had gotten back on YAP again when we got home, so I was nervous about Trump. Dani told me i was paranoid. Dad said he planned to vote for Trump because he was better than Hillary. Mom planned to vote for Hillary, as did Dani. But George was going to vote for Trump. Kevin didn’t plan to vote, even though he thought Hillary was better than Trump. He collected guns, and thought Hillary would come confiscate them, even though people had been saying that about Obama for the last eight years, and it hadn’t happened. Everyone thought he was paranoid, but he wouldn’t hear it. He also claimed it didn’t matter, because Georgia was going to vote for Trump no matter what he did. 

While we were there, Adam was pulling himself up on the edge of his mother’s chair and standing there kind of bouncing when he actually managed to pick up his left foot, and take his first step. Dani missed it, but I saw it and asked her why she hadn’t told me he was walking. She said he wasn’t, so I guess I got to see his first step. My mom saw it, too, but my dad was out at the grill and missed it. 

A funny thing happened shortly after that. I had a manic episode, and bought 10 shirts, and a pair of jeans, and then forgot about them. I also applied to get a gym membership from the wounded warrior project and forgot about that. In one day, all of them arrived, and I was just laughing. It was Christmas in June! All of the shirts were funny and I desperately needed new shirts if I was going to go to Israel, because I didn’t have enough to not have to do laundry for 10 days. So I left them folded up in that way that stores manage and no human being can do without mechanical help so they’d be as small as possible in my suitcase. I clearly didn’t think about trying to get them all home again. 

The only other thing that happened before Trump became the official nominee is that we went to Israel. Dani, George, and everybody else left at 10am, and I left at noon. As I arrived in New York, Erin called me and asked where I was because he had already boarded the next flight. I sprinted down to that airplane, where I had to go through security again. I got on the plane at 3 and we didn’t take off until 4. They had just let people on really early because of the need for additional screening by the Israelis. I let Erin know I was on the plane and then knelt in my seat talking to the people behind me for an hour until we took off. I decided to pay for internet on the flight since I didn’t think there could possibly be enough in flight entertainment to keep me busy until we got to Israel given the fact that I don’t like music or movies, and can only play a limited number of games of chess before I get bored with it. I had both my laptop and my iPad, and there was a USB plug at the seat, so I knew I could entertain myself for the entire flight for $19.99. I didn’t sleep at all on the flight, and we landed at noon the next day. 

Our hotel rooms weren’t ready for us, so we went to Jaffa and looked out over the Mediterranean Sea. The first thing I noticed was how green everything was. I mean, I had thought I was going to the middle of a desert but there were trees everywhere. You could still tell it was desert because there was sand and brown everywhere, but it was very green. I could even tell from the airport. Driving along, everything looked old including all the buildings. I was surprised to learn the next day that they were intentionally made to look old but really weren’t because Tel Aviv was a unesco world heritage site. That meant that everything had to be constructed to fit with the heritage they were trying to preserve. In Jaffa there were old and new buildings coexisting together and many of them were spray painted with graffiti. I couldn’t read anything because I have long since lost any Hebrew letters I knew. Street signs were posted in English and Arabic and Russian characters as well as Hebrew, so I could tell where I was. A lot of the stores were also posted in English. The graffiti however was in Hebrew or Arabic. 

We stopped for lunch at a shawarma place, which I had never had before. Rabbi Boxt ordered his food first, and I was able to express that I wanted the same thing as he had gotten, and then point at the various toppings - hummus, salad, french fries, pickles, and a few other things - to get myself a pita full of meat and hummus. It was amazing! I had never had hummus that tasted that good, and whatever was on the salad tasted really good. I suspected it was olive oil, straight from the source. So that was really good. 

We went back to the hotel, and took a nap before dinner. Dinner was a huge buffet with all kinds of middle eastern foods. Dani was much more adventurous than I was because she doesn’t have food allergies. I was afraid things would contain fish, so I only ate things I was familiar with. I made up for it at the dessert bar, though. After dinner we went up to Erin’s room, and shared a bottle of wine, or at least the others shared a bottle of wine. Even the kids had a little bit, although the girl hated it. Her mother seemed happy with that outcome. Afterwards we went to bed. Well, I showered, while the others walked to the Mediterranean Sea and then when they got back we went to bed. 

We woke up in the morning and drove up north to the Galilee. We spent four days in the Galilee, visiting an old munitions factory that was built underground where they built the ammunition for the war of independence. then we went up to an old Syrian bunker in jeeps where we explored the area carefully staying away from the sides of the road where there were signs saying there were mines. They gave us watermelon and let us throw the rinds off to the side. One of the children was feeling a little sick. His parents were trying to get him to drink water since it was so hot and dry. He was refusing. 

We went up to Safed. We went to two orthodox shuls. One was a mix between Sephardic and Ashkenazi traditions, and the other was Sephardic, but contained a picture of the face of God, which is forbidden in most of Judaism, but is acceptable to those who practice Kabbalah. We had to wear clothes covering our elbows and knees, and it was so hot outside, I really thought I was going to just collapse in a ball. We walked through some shops, but everything was insanely expensive. Dani and I got to the lemonade stand we were supposed to meet at about an hour early. I sat down in a nearby chair, and she walked into a store, and then paid to use the restroom while I bought a lemonade. We both had 2.5 liter bottles of water, also, which we were refilling a couple times a day. The water tasted a little heavy, like there was probably some kind of mineral in it. However, Rabbi Boxt promised us that in all the times he’d been to Israel the water had never made him sick, so we continued to drink it, and neither of us got sick at all. George didn’t like looking around in shops since there were do not touch signs everywhere, and he couldn’t see the artwork, so he was done before even we were and he just stood at the meeting spot. Eventually I ended up talking to him and trying to describe the artwork on the walls of the shuls we had been into. It was hard though because unlike most people I don’t think in images. It makes me and George good partners in crime, sometimes. He and I were friends before I introduced him to my sister and they hit it off. He was one of my SCA buddies. 

We were staying on a kibbutz in a gorgeous hotel that had fruit trees everywhere, and a walking path that meandered through them. There was no direct path anywhere, but we eventually learned how to get to the dining hall as quickly as possible. The dining hall was amazing, too, with so much food. I ate goose for the first time, and apparently that is more common there than here. It tasted a lot like beef. 

Our last day in the Galille we went to a teva factory. George and I sat outside at a picnic table in the shade waiting for everyone to be done shopping. I hate shoe shopping, and he didn’t see any advantage to buying them in Israel when he could just as easily order them off amazon.com. Dani bought a pair of the expensive shoes. Then they were off to a liquor tasting. It was really wine, but in Israel they aren’t allowed to call anything except grape products wine because someone might say the blessing over wine over their drink when it is not made from the fruit of the vine. There was a passionfruit wine that I really liked, but since I never really drank, I didn’t buy any. Dani and George bought a bottle of pomegranate wine. Katy didn’t like that one. 

It was Friday, and the plan was to spend the evening shabbat service at the Western Wall, so they drove into Jerusalem. It was also the last Friday of Ramadan, so the police were not allowing Jews into western Jerusalem, and instead we found a place on a promenade overlooking Jerusalem so we could see the old city, and we said our prayers there. We were joined by about 50 members of a Christian church, and I helped one of them follow along in the service by moving my fingers along to be next to the line we were saying at the time. We still move really quickly though and I don’t think she was saying anything aloud. 

Saturday we went to services. The sermon was given by a rabbi from Florida, so it was in English. He talked about the danger of a Trump presidency, and how we should all look out for anyone who says they want to register non-Christians. After services we had the option to go on a tour of the Christian quarter, but it was a walking tour, so I didn’t go. Dani, George, and I had lunch at the restaurant in the hotel, and then went upstairs to the pool. Dani lay in the sun while George and I took Adam into the pool and played with him. It was good to have a day to relax as we’d been going pretty much nonstop for days. 

Sunday we had a big walking day in downtown Jerusalem. We started with a tour of the aqueducts, which were dark and damp, but pretty interesting. They’d been dug before the Hebrews got there, but had been named for King David later. At the end, we had to walk up fifteen flights of stairs to get back to the starting point. There were busses to take you if your tour paid for them, but ours didn’t because sometimes Palestinians threw rocks at the busses. Let me tell you I would have taken having some rocks thrown at my bus rather than that hike! We took several breaks on the way up the stairs. At one point our tour guide said we didn’t need a break, but it was obvious to everyone else that we did so the rabbi interrupted him and asked him a question about history. This got him on a tangent for five minutes while we all sat and rested. When we got to the top, I bought a gatorade, and some peanuts, and sat down waiting for the half of our group that had gone even deeper into a part of the aqueducts that was still full of water. 

When we were done with the aqueducts, we went across the street and up a hill to the Western Wall. We were first scheduled to see the underground side, which showed what it looked like when it was built, because the upper walls had been changed some over time. I was just glad to be underground, and in the cool. Apparently there was a heat wave and everyone we met kept telling us that Israel is not usually that hot. But it was really hot. Even I wore shorts, and I don’t ever wear shorts. 

The next day we went to Masada and the Dead Sea. It was 130F. We had two b’nah mitzvot. And then we walked to the chapel and to the bath house. There was a lot more to see, but it was so hot and people were starting to drag behind, so we didn’t see it. We went down to the Dead Sea where it was even hotter. Even the water was hot. I went in expecting it to feel good, but it felt like walking into a hot tub on a summer day. Beyond that, I had scratches on the bottoms of my feet that burned like nothing I have ever experienced before when I stepped into the water. I ran out and caught the trolley back up to the fresh water pool, which wasn’t cool, but wasn’t awful, and didn’t hurt my feet. I sat there for the next two hours along with most of the rest of my group, and a birthright trip that was there. 

We had dinner at a touristy trap with someone dressed as Abraham, and a camel ride. We sat on the floor around the tables, and got various foods that Abraham would have eaten, including dates, hummus, and chicken. I was one of the last ones to ride a camel and was still making my way up the hill when the tour wanted to leave. They were looking for us when we got to the top. We loaded ourselves back on the bus and went back to the hotel. 

The last day we went to lunch with the church we were traveling with, and they had a huge assortment of food for us. This time there was someone available for me to ask what the foods were, so I was a little more willing to try things I didn’t recognize. Unfortunately, they served us raw beef, which I was not willing to eat the day I went on a long trip on an airplane. I filled up on hummus, and grapes, and got ready for the bus ride back to Tel Aviv. 

The flight home was longer than the flight there because of the jet stream and also because I stopped in Amsterdam instead of New York. The Amsterdam airport was a disaster with me having to walk forever, and then there was a long line I couldn’t determine if I was supposed to be in or not and they kept changing their minds as to whether I belonged there. Beyond that it came after a 5 hour flight with absolutely no in flight entertainment whatsoever. I read two newspapers back to front, because I couldn’t figure out anything else to do. I guess I was lucky the guy next to me finished his newspaper and was willing to give it to me. for the second flight I bought internet again, and this time there was a plug at the seat, so I was able to use my laptop for the entire trip. I chatted with Victor and read at YAP the whole time, as well as talking to Aedan for a while and Kevin while he was at work. As we crossed Ohio, Victor was the first to welcome me home. 

I got home and rode the train up to the farthest north east stop, where my mom picked me up and we went to dinner, as we did every Thursday. I went home and fell asleep as I had managed to sleep for about an hour on the plane during take off, but really hadn’t slept in about 50 hours. Kevin woke me up when he got home, but I was able to fall back asleep quickly, and I stayed asleep over night. 

I remember you seemed happy on that trip, Doctor Bell answered as she finished. “yes, very. I was happy for a long time. about three years. I mean I had down days, but I was mostly happy.”  
“Have you ever suffered from depression?”  
“Yes, for years before that, I did. Probably from high school until the end of graduate school. And even beyond that. Definitely while I was in the army I was depressed. And that made everything harder. Especially when I got kicked out and just felt like I had failed at yet another thing in life.”  
“What do you think made the difference?”  
“It was definitely the medicine. I mean, Doctor Dooley upped my geodon and a week later I felt fine, and felt fine forever more until things started going wrong, but even then, it was situational more than chronic.”  
“How do you feel now?”  
“Pretty depressed, honestly. I mean, I lost my sister, who was the other half of me. I lost a lot of friends. I lost my brother in law, who was my friend. I even lost my grandfather, which had nothing to do with politics or Trump but just the fact that he was 92 years old, and had Alzheimer’s Disease.  
“I know you cut back some on the geodon before the VA got cut four years ago. Have you gone back on your full dose of that.  
“Yes I’ve been on it for about 3 weeks. It’s working somewhat, but it won’t get rid of mourning. At least that’s what Doctor Hoffman says. I just have to work through it.”  
“I think that’s accurate. What are you doing in the mean time?”  
“Raising two kids, and four pets, dealing with my husband feeling worse and worse about his job constantly. Trying to keep up with my friends who haven’t left livejournal. Anything I can come up with to take my mind off things. I’m trying not to isolate myself, but it’s hard with an infant at home.”  
“I think it sounds like you’re doing as well as can be expected. Take some time for yourself, though, this week, and I’ll see you back next week at the same time.  
“OK. Thanks.” 

She drove home and relieved the babysitter. That night, after the kids went to sleep, instead of collapsing into bed herself, she sat down to read livejournal. About five posts in she saw a familiar name that she hadn’t seen in four years. Cam! Cam was trans, and she’d been afraid that he had been picked up in the genocide, but there he was posting. He said he was sorry to not post for so long, but he had become afraid to have his real name tied to his livejournal where he talked about making ftm purchases and being male, during Trump’s presidency, and after getting out of the habit of posting for four years, he had almost forgotten to come back, and then had forgotten his password to both the site and the email address he had used to join. He was back, and anticipated posting multiple times a day as he used to do. It seems his mother’s inability to deal with the fact that he was trans, and insistence that he not have surgery had probably saved his life. His mother had died two years prior, and as soon as Warren took over as president, he had had top surgery. He posted a picture of himself, and he looked like a man for the first time since Katy had known him. He even had facial hair, which she knew he had always wanted. He was sporting a goatee and a mustache. She wrote a message back, “welcome back - and congratulations! Someday is here” referencing his former remarks that he was always looking forward to someday when he could take trips and transition. Smiling for the first time that she could remember, she went to sleep. At least one thing was going back to normal. 

That weekend she left Emily with Kevin, and took Adam to see a Braves game. Adam was starting to play with the little league, and was on the Astros. Since the major league Astros were visiting, she decided to bring him to see them. Adam bounced up and down the entire walk from the parking lot to the stadium, which, even with Katy’s handicapped plates was over a mile hike since the Braves had moved out of downtown Atlanta. Still, it turned out to be a good thing that the Braves had already built a stadium outside of downtown, as the old stadium had been completely demolished when the bombs started falling. Traffic around Atlanta had always been something to deal with, but with the 75/85 interchange demolished, and everyone routing themselves around 285 it was even worse. Despite the fact that half of the ITP or Inside The Perimeter population had been killed in one day, along with a lot of suburbanites who worked in the area, traffic had never been worse in Atlanta. Marta had not started working again yet. The train tracks were demolished, and about half of the busses had been destroyed in the explosion. A few of the busses ran around the perimeter, but most places you couldn’t get by public transportation. That meant that everyone going to the Braves game had to drive and park there and it was an area that had always been high traffic, perpetually. As they were sitting in the stadium, one of the runners took a lead off from the base, and Adam started yelling, “he’s cheating! He's not standing on the base! He’s cheating!” Katy laughed before shushing him. “They’re allowed to in major leagues. But good for you knowing the rules, Adam.” The game was tied 1-1 at the bottom of the 9th inning, and despite the fact that Adam was getting a little cranky as 10pm hit, Katy told him they’d stay one more inning and then leave. The Braves scored once more in the bottom of the 10th, and then everyone mobbed the exits. They got to their car, and then just sat there waiting for an opportunity to back out as cars lined up behind her. Adam fell asleep in the back seat, and she couldn’t even turn on the radio for fear of waking him up. It was midnight before they got home, and she carried Adam to his room and then collapsed in her own.


	6. Chapter 6

The next Monday she met with Doctor Bell again, and she was running a little late because Jess had been running a little late getting to her house. It was only five minutes, but she hated missing the time. She knew she had to start with the beginning of the end today. July 19, 2016: Trump becomes the official nominee of the Republican Party for president of the United States of America. Well, life still wasn’t bad yet. Everyone thought Hillary would win. The people cheering for Trump still thought he would actually be better than business as usual. James and Mark both thought that Trump would put America back on a good path again. I, once again, concluded Mark’s brain had been eaten by zombies. Victor insisted that he had just drunk the koolade. Victor also insisted he was a smart person, but I never believed that. I knew he used to be but I figured something had happened to permanently change that and he had lost not only the predictive ability that marks a smart person, but the ability to ever get it back. I considered Victor to be ever the optimist when it came to Mark, but I didn’t share his optimism. There were so many signs that Trump was a terrible president I don’t understand how everyone missed them. He told us he wanted to register Muslims, and people posted memes showing Holocaust survivors with their registration numbers on their arms. How did people not realize that the step after registering them was to kill them? It was so obvious. I saw it coming ahead of time but apparently I was the only one. 

Adam started preschool at the jewish community center, or JCC. The preschool in Marietta was held at Temple Kol Emeth where Dani, George and I were members. The principal was my friend Becca.

A week later was my father’s birthday dinner. We all met in the living room, sitting on the only couch that Kevin can get up from with his bad knees. Mom served cheese and crackers which Kevin and Dani ate while the rest of us just watched them. I wasn’t feeling the greatest; my stomach hurt and I wasn’t confident in my ability to eat. Finally, dinner was served and we all went out onto the porch where the usual steak, asparagus, and potatoes were served. I ate two bites of steak and suddenly knew that was a mistake. I stood up and puked all over myself. My dad brought the hose in to clean up while I puked in the bushes, and my mom tried to keep the dog out of it. When I was finished, my mom, ever the consummate hostess, offered Kevin more steak but he decided to come home with me, and we left. From what I hear, no one else ate any more that day. 

I couldn’t keep my meds down. I tried, and threw up again. And this continued for a week before I was hallucinating so consistently that I decided to go down to the emergency room and see if they’d give me a shot of an antipsychotic. Instead they admitted me, gave me IV fluids, potassium, and some oatmeal. I stayed in the hospital for three days while they tried to figure out what was wrong with me, which they never did because they told me I had food poisoning, but Kevin got sick with the same thing I had a week after I first caught it. So clearly I was contagious. My parents came to see me in the hospital, but Kevin never did because he was feeling sick. Dani and George came by one night for about ten minutes. Mostly I slept. I didn’t even turn on the little tv in the room. My mom brought me a power cord for my phone, and I was able to get online a few times for 10 minutes at a time or so, but really I wasn’t awake enough to concentrate on my phone and I just slept. After I got out of the hospital, I ate nothing but bread and gatorade for a couple of days, before branching out to a little bit of meat, and finally a week later eating normally. That was probably the sickest I’ve ever been, and I hope I never experience anything like it again.

While I was still recovering, Victor got in a tiff with Sugar at YAP, and Cooter banned them both. I was unimpressed with anything that threatened to separate me from Victor, especially since Victor didn’t even know how long he was banned for, so I decided Cooter had been eaten by a vampire, and started following him around causing trouble. Victor couldn’t see it, and had logged off of Facebook, so I couldn’t even tell him what was going on, so this just continued for the rest of the day, and into the next day until I saw that Victor was back and immediately calmed myself. While I was still frantic, Roddy posted a prediction that Trump would win New York. I asked him if he wanted to make a bet on that, and he agreed. We bet $100 to the charity o the winner’s choice on the outcome of the New York election. well, thank goodness I won that bet, even if I came very close to losing it. 

October first was Dani and my birthday dinner. It actually fell on the proper day that year. It was still warm enough to eat on the porch so we all crammed around the table with George and Dani sharing a bench. I admitted I was afraid of a Trump presidency. Dani thought I was paranoid, and my dad was afraid of a Hillary presidency. I mean, yeah, he ended up voting for Trump and I am having a very difficult time forgiving him for that. He was so afraid of her corruption, he totally ignored all of Trump’s corruption. Dani tried to calm everyone down. She was never the most politically astute and just claimed that no matter who won the presidency America would lose and it would be the worst president in history. I guess she was right about one thing. Trump was the worst president in history. 

People at the PRRC were afraid of a Trump presidency, too. We were incensed when he took a purple heart from a soldier and said, “thanks, I always wanted one of these.” Like, if you wanted one you should have not dodged the draft, and earned your own. But beyond that, who wants a purple heart? A lot of the guys at PRRC have purple hearts, and they were all offended. I was surprised anyone in the military voted for him after that. But there’s no accounting for some people I guess. 

Shortly thereafter, I decided Trump was a vampire who couldn’t go out in the sun and is orange because he was spray painting himself to look human, and doing a poor job of it. Victor tried to convince me he was human, but he failed. The election became a battle ground of good versus evil and I was convinced that Trump and his supporters were pure evil. This strained my relationship with my father and George. I couldn’t believe these people I thought were good people, and thinking people, would do this. I mean no one was surprised either of them voted republican in every election, but I was surprised they’d vote for pure evil. People began criticizing me for making it an election between good and evil on YAP. That’s where I knew Trump supporters from. People were offended but I guess they shouldn’t have been because I was right. It was an election between good and evil, and evil won. It wasn’t made any better the next day when a video surfaced of Trump claiming he grabbed women by the pussy and they let him because he was rich. Now not only was he a vampire, but he was a sexual predator who probably wanted to turn innocent women into vampires also. James tried to claim that all men talk that way in private, but Norman, Victor, and quite a few others insisted that they didn’t. I became afraid of James, and thought that he would grab a woman by the pussy. I wouldn’t put it beyond him at all. He is kind of a creep. And he believes feminists all smell bad. Anyway, I became convinced that all of the conservatives who were voting for Trump were evil. Nothing could convince me otherwise, and nothing will ever convince me otherwise. 

This was even further rubbed in the next week when James posted a picture of Bill Clinton smiling with a caption that said, “stop that, it’s Bruce Jenner.” I replied “Caitlin” which apparently started a huge fight because James was the leader of a large contingent of transphobic assholes and they all attacked. The board is a little weird. It has a rule against racism, but not bigotry in general, so it was allowed to stand over night until Cooter locked it and called it trolling the next day. 

Cy came back to the board, and Cy never met a conspiracy he didn’t believe from faked moon landings to 9/11 Truth. So he was convinced that Hillary’s body had been taken over by lizard aliens and you could occasionally see her eyes flash and look like a cats, or you could see the lizard skin breaking through at various times. He had plenty of videos of this happening, and no amount of telling him that it was clearly digitally manipulated was helping. So one day he went off on this, and I gave up on him. I was pretty convinced he was schizophrenic, and I don’t think it’s right to mock the mentally ill for being mentally ill. But the next day I was talking about this at PRRC and someone said, “yeah actually, that’s true.” So apparently I knew two people who believed that. I was pretty shocked by this, but I shouldn’t have been since the PRRC is for schizophrenic and bipolar veterans, and you almost had to be schizophrenic to believe that. I was willing to mock Cy sometimes because he claimed the only pills he was on were Vitamin D. 

So, finally it was the election night. I went out with some friends to Starbucks to write from 6-9, but then at 9 I drove him and turned on the TV. I was up all night waiting for results to come in, since there was no way to predict the winner until Alaska came in. Trump won 263-275, though he did lose New York as I predicted in my bet with Roddy. Everyone at YAP was up late so I suggested we all chat together in the YAP chatroom, which most of the time sat unused. Everyone joined me, and we had a mostly pleasant time talking about men, and women, and children, and anything else we could come up with that wasn’t political. Finally, at 2am, the final results came in and Trump had won. I was shocked. I was so sure that Hillary was going to win, despite falling in polls for the week prior to the election. Mark gloated, which was his right after how much Victor had mocked him for predicting a Trump victory. He told us the people had won. So much for that. I decided vampires had rigged the election so that one of their own would be in charge of the nation. I said as much in the chat room, and Victor private messaged me to try to calm me down, but you really couldn’t calm me from that point. Roddy refused to pay the $100 he owed me, but that shocked nobody. I was trying to make him make a donation to Georgia Aquarium, which is an organization that teaches climate change, and Roddy was a climate change denier. For the first time I was thankful that Kevin and I hadn’t had the foresight to invest in the stock market. 

The next day I slept late. By the time I woke up trading was already frozen for the day on the NYSE because almost every stock was down 30%. These safeguards had been put in place during the Great Depression to prevent people from losing everything overnight. Foolishly I assumed that things would bound along at a 30% loss for a while, but the next day before I could wake up again, there was another 30% loss, and trading had been frozen for the day. People were jumping from the tops of the AT&T building, and not just one or two, but lots of them. I guess if you lost 60% of your clients and your own net worth in two days, I might jump too. Kevin was cavalier about it, making jokes about what would happen if two jumpers collided midair and could you consider that a murder-suicide. New York was worse. The suicides made international news. My friend in New Zealand asked me about them. The third day, trading slowed enough that it didn’t shut down for the day until after I woke up in the afternoon, but it still dropped 30% and froze trading. President Obama decided to shut the stock market for a week, in the hopes that that would give people enough time to calm down. My parents were wiped out. They were retired, and were living off of social security and money they had in the stock market. Now all of a sudden they didn't have enough to pay the bills, and my mother had to go back to work. She had been a public school teacher when she worked, so she went to work as a substitute teacher and worked at literally any school around the county. She even worked with the autism classroom. She hated it; she had gone from traveling every other week and never being home because she was in the mountains or at the beach or in Hawaii or in Greece constantly, to working 40 hour weeks. My dad tried to pick up odd jobs, but people were losing jobs left and right, and almost no one could find a job. He ended up working part time for the company he had founded, and then sold, as a personal favor to him by the new owner who was grateful that he still had a job despite everything going on around him. So my parents went back to work, but they didn’t pull out of the stock market. My dad was convinced it would rebound quickly once Trump took over and people realized that nothing was going to really fundamentally change. I thought about trying to invest the $1,000 Kevin and I had in savings, but wasn’t convinced it was done falling, so I didn’t do it. I guess that turns out to be a good thing. 

That was the end of the good times, really. Soon afterwards, Trump became president, and everything just went to Hell.   
I guess that’s a good stopping point then. We’re almost out of time.   
Yeah.   
What do you have planned for the rest of the week? Dr Bell asked her.   
Wednesday I’m going to swim with the whale sharks with the wounded warrior project. And Thursday the next Thor movie is coming out, so Kevin and I will go see that. It’s a big exciting week for me. I used to do things every day, but not anymore. Now I pretty much stay home with the kids, check Adam’s homework, read to the kids, It’s lonely. But I can’t afford a babysitter to do a bunch of other stuff, so I guess that’s my life now. I should be happy with it. I wanted to be a mother. But I always assumed Dani would be there to help with the kids if i were ever lucky enough to have any.


	7. Chapter 7

Exactly a week later, she found herself in the same chair talking to the same doctor. She helped herself to a white chocolate kiss, and put her purse down on the table beside her.   
I think Trump was about to become president, Doctor Bell prompted her.   
Yeah, so you know, Trump became president, and the stock market collapsed again, as if people weren’t expecting it or something. Maybe people were hoping Obama would refuse to hand over the reigns and become dictator. In hind sight, that would have been the better option. The next day Hillary was arrested for undisclosed crimes. Mark and James cheered. Victor was more on point, calling it a banana republic. I guess he told us he was going to do it in the last debate though. Still, it surprised me that he followed through on that. Arresting the opposition should have been our first warning of what was to come. But republicans cheered, loudly. 

Trump waited about two weeks before declaring it illegal to wire money to Mexico. That was a huge chunk of Mexico’s GDP. A lot of immigrants just went home because they could no longer provide for their families back home, but even more than that they started getting their families to the United States where they suddenly needed teachers, and ESL classes in schools, and free lunches in schools, and all sorts of things. And of course they were just children, but republicans went nuts. Immigrants are taking over our country was heard from all over California and Arizona, and Texas. 

Trump was good to his word and cut taxes on himself and the rest of the 1% and the stock market reacted by collapsing. No one thought this was a good move, except Trump himself. Even China got sick of us, and demanded repayment of the national debt immediately and in pounds. Trump responded by declaring war on China, which I mean, there are so many Chinese people they could come at us with spoons, and they’d never run out of people. Fortunately the war was mostly a naval war. Without our debt, China couldn’t afford to pay for the war, and Trump was just printing new money left and right. This messed us up, because we were already barely making it, and now there was inflation haunting us. 

Somehow in the midst of all of this, Mexico agreed to pay for the wall if we resumed wire transfers to them. So Trump managed to live up to three campaign promises pretty quickly. Mark and James were excited. I didn’t understand the point of a physical wall when we have airplanes and most illegal immigrants just overstay visas but come here legally. I really thought the entire thing was entirely pointless, but Norman and Victor argued vehemently against the wall. They called it racist, and another poster named Curt made fun of them whining “that’s raaaaaaaacist, dude I think the term racist has lost all meaning.” Curt was one of those people. He didn’t support Trump in general, but he voted for him because he was afraid Hillary would come for his guns, just like he had been afraid that Obama would come for his guns, and he basically allowed the country to go to hell because he wanted his damned guns. I never found him particularly sympathetic. Still, I guess he was in for a shock. 

May 10th. That’s George’s birthday. So I will always remember the date. Congress got bombed. 500 of the 535 congress critters were killed, and Trump declared a state of emergency, and sent the other 35 home. They claimed China did it, but I always suspected it was a sort of Reichstag fire. You know what else? James was still cheering for it. He said congress had been taken over by democratic scum and he was happy that Trump had taken over. At least Mark had the decency to become somewhat worried. He said he was glad Trump was the president when it happened, though, which seemed like the stupidest thing you could say since it wouldn’t have happened had Hillary won. Norman agreed with me that it was a Reichstag fire, but Dani thought I was paranoid. She was certain it was the Chinese, since we were already at war with them, and that’s what was being reported. She said if there were any chance Trump had done it, the main stream media would have jumped on that. I thought that they were too afraid to since we now lived under an official dictatorship. 

The very next day Trump followed through on yet another campaign promise. He declared it illegal for muslims to enter the country, even citizens who left couldn’t come back. James and Mark cheered this because James was a bigot who would cheer anything that harmed anyone who was not a straight white man. Mark, I’m not sure what was up with him. He had just become worried the day before, and now he was cheering for Trump again. Norman, Victor and I became very worried. Even Dani and George became worried. I looked up my two muslim friends on facebook, Nur and Seth. They had moved here from Saudi Arabia, but Seth was born here, and Nur was born there. They both seemed very worried, and Nur was pleading for people to trust that she and her family were not bad people. There was nothing I could do to help, but I thanked her for being my example of a good muslim, and told her I would still trust her to babysit. Seth wasn’t saying much, but then he never did. 

We had another three weeks before anything affected me personally, but once it did, boy did it ever. It was June first, so I was expecting to get paid, when my check never came in and Trump went on the air to declare that those on disability were moochers, and he cancelled all disability programs. He said, “And those on disability, what losers right? I prefer those who don’t… who don’t need to leech off the government. And I bet most of those who are mooching could work if they wanted to. Most of them could work. So I am hereby cancelling the disability programs in this country, and forget about the ADA. Everybody get to work.” This affected a lot of my friends since I knew most people through the PRRC. James was disabled, and used a wheel chair and was on social security. Nat probably could work, but he had refused his whole life, and now didn’t qualify for any kind of position. So James went back to work designing bridges, which he enjoyed. George lost his job since it was government work helping the blind use computers. I guess a lot of stuff looked like it was a disaster at that point. And it really was. 

Plus, in the same speech, Trump declared that there are only two genders and it matches what you were born with. All treatments to change genders became illegal. I was talking to Aedan during this, and he seemed very worried. He didn’t have insurance, and suddenly he couldn’t get testosterone injections. He lost his beard and refused to use any bathroom in public. That’s about when Cam disappeared, too. I guess he got paranoid about being found out through his livejournal, so he quit posting without warning. The PRRC closed, along with all government programs for the disabled, as I’m sure you know, since you worked for the VA back then, too. I suddenly couldn’t afford insurance, or to get any medical care. I started having voices in my head all the time, and there was nothing I could do to stop them since I couldn’t afford a psychiatrist. Even my father became worried at that point. He was afraid for my safety, even if he didn’t care about the rest of the country. 

The next day Kevin and I decided I had to either go back to school or find a job. Since it had been ten years since I’d done either, and I probably would have wound up earning less than I got from disability, I decided to apply for an MAT program and become a teacher. I already had a masters degree in history, so I could teach history to high school kids, and that would be fine. Nat did nothing to try to find work. I’m not sure what he thought would happen, but he was a work refuser, and he refused to work. Harold got a job playing guitar for his church, and he really enjoyed that. It was only 15 hours a week, but he had only been 50% disabled anyway, so that made up for that income. Paula opened her own business as a wedding planner, which was perfect for her. It was a big risk, of course, but it seems to have worked for her. She was 100% disabled originally, but has since come down to 50% so she can work full time, and continue her wedding planning. 

Then, I really had to laugh at Curt when Trump declared a mandatory gun buy back, and cancelled the second amendment completely. He had been so afraid that Hillary would come after his guns, he didn’t realize a genuine dictator would come for them first. He and Kevin both refused to turn in their guns, although both of them had to hide them, and couldn’t even go tot he range anymore. Almost no one actually turned in their guns, but people started getting arrested and sentenced to 20 years in prison if they were caught with them. I begged Kevin to turn his in, but he was still convinced everything would blow over. 

Trump put Barron Trump in charge of the news media, and nothing was allowed to be broadcast without explicit permission. Even newspapers were not allowed freedom of the press. Everything was filtered through Trump’s lens, and had to be approved. Even internet sites such as Huffington Post were subjected to this ban. YAP survived because it hired no professionals, and was basically just a bunch of people who came together to express opinions and they were required to link to official news sources when they wanted to discuss something, so they would have to use the official sources, or, as Norman did more frequently, he linked to the BBC. Eventually, access to the BBC was cut from American IP addresses, and the only news we had access to was filtered by Barron. Most of the journalists wound up quitting their jobs out of fear of saying the wrong thing and being put on trial, which would certainly just be a show trial with a guaranteed conviction. The talking heads: Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, etc, kept their jobs, and no news programs were allowed to compete with their segments anymore. During those two hours a week if you wanted it from news you got it from those two men. My father already listened to Limbaugh, so he thought it was great. I got most of my news from the internet, so it didn’t effect me very much, but Daily Kos and Huffington Post shut down, so there was only right wing news available anymore. 

Since I no longer had the PRRC and George no longer had a job, but Dani could afford things like vacations on her salary, we went to Hilton Head. It was June, so it was very busy, and there were multiple hour waits for every restaurant we wanted to go to, but we spent most of our time reading on the beach, while George went swimming with Adam. I reread the entirety of Number the Stars, since I talked about that book when I volunteered at the Jewish museum. Then I read My Sister’s Keeper which I had been meaning to read for quite a while, ever since Dani suggested it to me two years prior. Both were good books, although I cried like a baby at the end of My Sister’s Keeper, which turned out to be very different than the movie, which I had watched on an airplane years prior. I tried eating alligator at a restaurant on a pier in Hilton Head, and it was delicious. I joked that I would never see another alligator without thinking how much I wanted to eat it. It tasted a bit like goose. I guess evolutionarily they’re related, though not as related as a goose is to a chicken, and they don’t taste alike at all. 

A week after we got home, Trump declared socialists to be national enemies. Kiki was smart and got out of the country. She moved into Nick’s apartment in Toronto. Drake disappeared. Sometimes he didn’t’ talk for a few weeks at a time, so we didn’t immediately panic, but eventually, there was panic. We didn’t see him ever again. 

Nat and his family got kicked out of their house. The kids went to stay with their father, but Dawne and Nat wound up on the street. For a while they had a car they were able to sleep in, but eventually that got repossessed too, and they were sleeping on benches. Fortunately for now it was July, but I suggested they start walking south so they’d be down here by the time the snow started. They didn’t listen to me, and I never heard from either of them again either, and nor did his ex wife Elizabeth, who was lucky enough to be living with a friend, and didn’t get kicked out until she could find a job. She eventually found a job at Walmart, which she worked 30 hours a week, which was enough to survive on. She didn’t last the entire four years there, though, and kept bouncing between jobs the way disabled people do. There was no room at shelters for Nat and Dawne because a lot of disabled people had found themselves needing them. 

Nur posted a meme saying “be that muslim” that makes people say, “no, I know a muslim and they’re not all bad.” I told her she and her brother and sister were that muslim for me, and thanked her for being so. It was funny because the typical reaction I had to muslims was my reaction to Palestinians, which was to think they didn’t love their children as much as they hated jews, and I thought that was despicable. Nur and Seth and Zainab really were the example that told me that not all muslims were hateful people. 

At the end of the month, Trump declared that muslims were no longer citizens of the United States. They were required to register, and wear crescents on their clothing. Membership lists were taken from mosques and community centers, and people were put under surveillance. In addition, transgender people had to register, and doctors were required to hand over a list of patients. That was the last straw for Laurie and Alyssa who moved to Israel. A Canadian transgender man bombed the mall of America, blowing up four stores and killing seventy people. Trump took the excuse to invade Canada, and started actively recruiting the disabled people to join or rejoin the military and fight Canada. Great Britain joined America in the war while Germany and France joined Canada. China was already at war with us, and they joined the fighting along the Canadian border. 

That September, I started an MAT, or Masters of Arts in Teaching, program at Georgia State University, to teach high school history. It was the same day that almost all of the mosques in the country were destroyed. The fire departments showed up, but didn’t stop the blazes, watching them so they didn’t burn down any adjacent buildings. Thousands of muslims were arrested, and Nur told me that Seth had disappeared from the mosque that day. I recognized this play. I literally texted Norman, “what is this, Kristalnacht?” and he agreed. Even Dani was getting worried although she was more excited because George had started a job teaching computers at a school for the Deaf and blind. It was the first income he’d have in a few months and even though they didn’t need it, the extra was nice. Plus George liked feeling like he was contributing. 

Immigrants started being deported over the wall. This started with criminals and illegal aliens, like Trump had eventually promised. But it turns out he thought they were all criminals, so he didn’t stick to that. 

Upset with the events of our kristalnacht, a muslim man shot up an elementary school in Florida. He was sentenced to death, but a large part of his trial was around his right to own guns at all. Trump must have realized that the supreme court would rule against his gun ban because he disbanded the supreme court. Everyone except James disapproved of disbanding the supreme court, but James continued to cheer all things republican. So much for respecting the constitution, I guess. I said as much, but he just swore at me. By this point, school shootings were normal in America, and more of them happened each and every year. I’m not sure why this one was so important, but maybe because it was the first one done by one of Trump’s enemies. Everyone, even the most liberal of liberals was against the gun laws. Dani started to think that maybe I wasn’t paranoid. Muslims had to wear a crescent on themselves at all times, and transgender individuals were supposed to wear a pink triangle. Not wearing these symbols was punishable by instant death if a police officer caught you they were allowed to shoot you in the street. 

I guess this is a good place to stop.   
OK Next week at the same time?   
Yes I’ll see you then. 

She went home and relieved the babysitter. She went to her mother’s house with the children for dinner. they did this every Wednesday while her father played tennis. They had a few favorites that they always hit. This included Outback Steakhouse, after veterans day because they had 10% off for veterans in the end of the year. It was a little bit further than her mother usually liked to drive, because her mother rarely drove more than 5 minutes at a time. This week they went to Outback and they were offering a 3 course meal for $11.99. Katy ordered a salad and steak while her mother ordered a salad and shrimp. Adam ordered a burger off the children’s menu, and Emily ate a few bites of both Katy and Jan’s meal, as well as some cheerios that Katy brought from home. They shared two pieces of carrot cake which came with the adult meals. The waiter there was really funny telling them, “I bought some shoes from a drug dealer, and I don’t know what they’re laced with but I’ve been tripping all day” they laughed and Jan tipped him better than usual. On the way home Emily started crying and wouldn’t stop. Jan pulled over in a parking lot so Katy could try to calm her down, but she refused to be calmed. Eventually, Katy tried feeding her a bottle, and that seemed to work, so she strapped her into a car seat and they finished driving home. Katy decided to put on the hot tub while they were there, and let Adam enjoy the heat for a while. It took about an hour to heat up which was a lot less long than it had been when she was growing up because the family had put in a new heater about 6 years prior. Adam and Katy sat in the hot tub for about half an hour, which was much shorter than Katy typically sat there, but because she had a young kid she didn’t want to over do it. She was constantly seeing warnings about hot tubs at the hotels in Hilton Head or Gatlinburg that told people not to sit there too long, so she didn’t allow Adam in for too long. It seemed a little ridiculous to heat it up for such a short time, but her parents didn’t seem to mind, so she did it occasionally.


	8. Chapter 8

Monday she was back at the psychologist’s office. Doctor Bell was a short man with dirty blond hair, and he always crossed his left ankle over his right knee while he listened to her. She, on the other hand, shifted around a lot, but usually sat with one ankle under the opposite knee and her foot on the chair. People at the PRRC had commented on it saying it would make her good at yoga, but reality was she was terrible at yoga because she was the least flexible person her physical therapist had ever met. 

Katy and Dani were identical, and both wore their hair long down to their mid back. They had dark brown hair, and reddish skin. They were 5’3” so exactly average for an American female. Both were overweight, though Katy more so than Dani. They had light brown eyes, a combination of their father’s dark brown and their mother’s blue eyes. It was hard to tell them apart, and the only way to tell was a birthmark on Dani’s right cheek. Also, Dani was left handed while Katy was right handed. The only way to tell the was to watch them write, though because Katy did many other things with her left hand. 

Doctor Bell smiled at her. We got to the labeling of people last week, right?   
Yes, that’s right. None of that affected my family though. We had another family dinner with my parents and Dani and George and Adam, and me and Kevin. My dad still supported Trump. My mom was appalled because she expected him to turn on him when he cancelled disability. He still hadn’t, even though I pointed out all the similarities between what was happening in our country and what happened in Nazi Germany. He still denied it. It was amazing he just went “well maybe we should know who these muslims are? And don’t you want to know if you’re in the bathroom with a man?”  
“No!” I emphatically replied. “Trans women, are women just like me and they have a right to pee in peace.” I really didn’t think my dad was going to support Trump after everything he had done, but I guess I was unpleasantly surprised. 

 

The next month Elizabeth told me that Nat had intentionally been arrested so that he would go back to jail and have a roof over his head. He had Dawne claim he beat her, even though he didn’t, so that he’d spend some time in jail. He wound up spending three months in jail, which was November to January, so when he came out it was still really cold, and he did it again so that he’d have a place to stay through May when it finally started warming up again. I started writing him letters, which he never answered, but Elizabeth told me he thanked me for each one. 

Mom cooked Thanksgiving dinner for us again that year. We had my favorite sweet potato casserole and mashed potatoes, and green beans, and of course lots of turkey, and three pies with ice cream. We all sat around the dining room table inside, instead of our usual spot on the porch. We also had cranberry sauce. I don’t like the stuff, but Dani loved it. The funny thing was my mom would make homemade cranberry sauce and she would turn up her nose at it in favor of the crap that comes out of a can. That’s what she was raised with and that’s what she liked. My grandmother used to serve it. We avoided talking about politics which I think my parents were making a general rule. 

January I started student teaching at Norcross High School. I had one period of world history, and then took night classes two nights a week on how to teach. Frequently I thought “gee I wish I had known this a week ago” when lessons covered things I’d just managed to get wrong a short time ago. For example, on my first day I stood in front of the classroom waiting for them to be quiet, and I waited, and waited, and it never happened. The next week we went over techniques to get their attention. My class was World History from 1500 - 1945. The students had just finished learning ancient history and medieval history with the same teacher. 

I visited the school psychiatrist, which I could do for free as a student there. I found out that even with the insurance I bought from the school my meds were $25 each, or $100 a month. I stopped taking two of them so that I could afford the critical two, but that meant that I had nothing to do for acute problems. If I started to panic, I just had to breathe and try to get through it. Victor’s stone kept me relatively sane, sometimes, but I had a lot of really difficult moments. I would wind up thinking something on the floor was going to eat me if I put my feet on the ground and wound up crying in bed unable to move. One time I desperately needed to go to the bathroom when this happened, and I ended up deciding to test the floor by throwing the dog onto the ground and seeing if she survived. When she did, I got up and went to the bathroom but I quickly got stuck only in places where I could see the dog. My psychiatrist tried to offer techniques that might help, such as talking to hallucinations, or saying aloud “you are not real.” That didn’t help as much as Victor’s suggestions to blow them up, so I did that more frequently. But they just came back, like there was an endless supply of them.

About a month after school started I called a student named John Josh. John got really upset with me and complained to the principal, who fussed at me and told me I needed to find a way to know my students better if I expected to succeed as a teacher. I wound up crying, and then making flash cards with my students names and photos on them so that I could study them. 

The army took over Toronto later that month, and Nick and Kiki attempted to flee to Winnipeg. Nick didn’t make it, however, and stepped on a mine exploding everywhere but at least managing to take out three American soldiers with himself. Kiki escaped with a car and got to Winnipeg, where she logged back onto squad, and told me what happened. That was pretty much the end of squad since that was one in four of our active members. 

I called my sister, who attempted to cheer me up by telling me that Adam had a new favorite book, and really loved the copy of The Very Hungry Caterpillar I had given him for his first birthday. He asked her to read it every night, and she was getting a little sick of it, but he adored it, and would throw a temper tantrum if it wasn’t read to him. I offered to buy him another book, but Dani said that they had plenty of books, he just had gotten stuck on the one. They never read the other books they owned. In trying to cheer me up, she invited me to an Atlanta Hockey Fans meet up, with her and George the next night. 

We went to that with Keith and Jonathan and Carol, we watched the Blackhawks beat Toronto, which had to play all away games now because they couldn’t get back to Toronto. This made an already poor team terrible. They had been the worst team in hockey two years prior, and were defending that title. We also watched the Wild beat the Avalanche which made me unhappy. I didn’t really like watching the Toronto game either, because that had been Nick’s team, and it made me remember him. 

May 10, 2018, exactly a year after the congress bombing, an airplane ran into the new World Trade Center building. I was certain both were false flag operations, but Trump blamed it on Muslims. The next day Trump announced that all muslims must meet at the nearest bus station. he sent the military around to ensure this happened. He tried to keep this a secret but everyone knew what was going on. Nur and Seth were missing and the muslim woman down the street no longer tried to pick up her son from the bus stop. Two of my students disappeared from school, and one of my classmates did as well. Aedan went missing, even though he wasn’t muslim, but he was transgender and Trump had previously targeted trans individuals, so I was sure it was connected. My father finally stopped supporting Trump. James, on the other hand, cheered the actions and said we’d be better off without Muslims. 

In class the next day, I spoke to my students, who had been born in 2002. I told them about the previous World Trade Center bombing, when I was living in New York City. I was working in the World Trade Center but from 8pm to 2 am every day, My roommate and I were asleep when the bombing happened. We woke up and tried to get to work, but none of the taxis or busses were running. We waited on a bus for over an hour before some stranger stopped us and told us what had happened. I felt like my world had ended. In an hour I lost my job, and how many other people that I knew who wouldn’t survive and I would never even know. The entire country went nuts for a while. 

Dani was in Colorado for school. She was also still asleep. She got a call from a friend but didn’t wake up for it, so her AIM was flooded with “where are you?” “Do you sleep through everything?” She woke up and went to see her professor because for some reason she thought that would still take place. Instead she met a friend and was told to go to the chapel for an interfaith prayer service. She ended up with some friends dragging her out to watch a movie that night. That was after she reconnected with me. the phones weren’t working that day in New York and it was impossible to get a line out of the city. I didn’t really use the internet back then, it was still new technology and Dani was into it but I wasn’t so much. I did log on to my roommate’s internet and send an email out to Dani and my parents saying that I was safe, and would be returning home as soon as flights started up again. My parents were glad to have me. 

My first semester of student teaching ended the next week, and I got my first experience of grading hell. I was done with classes, but I spent 8 hours a day every day grading essays for a week. Students were emailing me constantly asking for their papers, which I was trying to get through as fairly as I could. I realized why we so rarely had to write essays in large classes in college. The professor would never get them all done in time. I finally finished, and managed to get a bell curve around a 79, which meant I was being a little nicer than I wanted to be, but not enough so to worry about it. It meant the average student had a C+ and that was certainly fair. 

“How did you feel about your first semester teaching?” Doctor Bell asked me.   
“Well, it was great really, I mean there were a few setbacks, but I enjoyed it, and I wanted to continue doing it. I had made a friend in one of my classes, Allison, and she and I studied and graded together.”  
“You’ve struggled to make friends. How did you do it this time?”  
“I don’t know. We were partnered together in a project, and so we exchanged phone numbers, and then I invited her to the aquarium with me, and then she called me… it just happened. I wish it would just happen more frequently.”  
“Well that’s great!”  
“Yeah, I’m really excited about this.”  
“OK well, I think this is a stopping point.”   
“Yeah. Stop on a high note for once.” She smiled. “Same time next week?”   
“You know it.” 

That Wednesday she met her mother and brought Adam for dinner. It was Dani and George’s anniversary, and both their mother and Katy were depressed about it. Adam didn’t know yet, so they didn't tell him, and continued trying to put on a happy face for him. It broke her heart though, that they should be having dinner with the whole family, and instead it was just another day with her mother. 

Over the weekend she went to a mental health and wellness meeting. Laura, Tom, and Dick had all survived the last four years, although Alyssa had become homeless and had joined the army to fight Canada, and hadn’t survived. The four of them took the back room at chocolate coffee in Decatur, which had survived the bombing, but the road to get there hadn’t, so it now took twice as long for Katy to get there from her home in Norcross. It was the first time they had met since the bomb fell, so they were all anxious to talk about that event. That upset Katy because she still wasn’t ready to talk about Dani’s death so she tried to change the subject. Eventually they all ended up talking about the problems Laura had with her brother and how they had stopped speaking to each other during the Trump presidency because her brother had supported Trump throughout the term, and had even voted republican in the next election. Laura had lost her disability and become homeless, so she was not very forgiving of Trump voters or republicans. They talked a little about the World Trade Center bombing, and how Loose Change, a video that made a series of conspiracy videos about the first World Trade Center bombing claiming George W Bush was aware of what was going to happen and bombed the buildings with thermite, They had made a second follow up video claiming Trump was responsible for the second World Trade Center bombing, but no one at the time had believed them because they had no credibility, but it turned out to be true.


	9. Chapter 9

The following Monday, she was back at Doctor Bell’s office. She waited impatiently for 3:00 exactly, when she was called back into the back hallway to wind her way to Doctor Bell’s office. She accepted the proffered chocolate, and sat down in the seat across from his. She sat on her foot, curling her leg up under herself. Over the course of the hour, she would shuffle back and forth sitting on one foot then the opposite. 

We talked about teaching last time, he reminded her. 

Yeah. And come August, I was right back to it. Of course on the first day of school, Trump took over Vancouver, but Canada and Germany took over Maine. I remember I was jealous of Maine because they were finally free of the monster. I’m Facebook friends with a couple of girls who go to camp every summer in Maine. Camp was obviously cancelled, because it was in the middle of a war zone, even out in Casco there were Canadian soldiers, and they were not allowing travel for Americans to or from the area. This would destroy their economy if it lasted into the next summer. As it was, all of the kids at summer camps were allowed one week to go back to the United States or else they’d be stuck in Canada indefinitely. 

I was teaching again, and rather successfully. I had a class of 11th graders for US history. Some of the students I had the year prior were back in my class, which made learning their names a little easier. There were still over 20 kids I didn’t know, though, so I made flashcards again, and studied. By the second week I knew them all, which is fairly amazing given that I’m face blind. I was supposed to teach a unit on pilgrims to go along with the students reading The Scarlet Letter in their English class. All of the units and English class units were carefully timed to go together in 11th grade. 

Sunday the land war everyone had been anticipating for the second half of Obama’s second term started in Syria. America was desperately hurting for soldiers at this point, and took two actions I thought were reckless. First, they reinstated the draft for everyone, male and female, under the age of 35. Fortunately, Dani and I had both just turned 35 but our cousin Kelly wound up having to quit her job and join the navy. I knew that the last time we lost a ship was in world war two, but we were fighting Germany again, and their military was even more formidable than it had been in the 1940s, so I worried. First she had a month of bootcamp during which I wrote her letters every other day. I heard from her twice, and she assured me she was doing well. Kevin told me to tell her to suck on a lemon at meals to save her voice. She later said that was the best advice she’d ever received. A month later she was on a ship in the Mediterranean Sea. Kevin said she couldn’t receive any mail on the ship, so I stopped writing her. 

Second, Trump lowered the age to volunteer for the military to 15, allowing students to drop out of high school and be guaranteed $30k a year. Three of the students in my thirty person class took advantage of the offer and left school immediately. Those kids were so young, they couldn’t possibly think through the consequences of their actions thoroughly, but now they were soldiers, and they’d end up either in Canada or Syria. Russia joined the war opposed to us and fought for the Syrian government. 

Two weeks later, I saw Allison again for the first time since summer classes ended. She was devastated. She worked at a low income school in the inner city, and almost half her students had left school to join the military. Some of the failing school districts were absolutely decimated by this decision, but as long as the war machine kept moving, no one in charge seemed to care. 

While we were in class that night, Germany bombed Boston. A lot of people were killed, and Mark was injured. I found it difficult to feel bad for him, since he had voted for Trump in the first place, but nonetheless, I sent him a teddy bear in the hospital. Victor went to see him but I understand they had a frosty meeting. Mark was still a republican, and tried to talk politics with Victor. Victor had not become as intolerant of republicans as I had, but he hated stupidity, and Mark was constantly spewing stupidity. He ended up losing his leg, but despite myself, I wound up being thankful it hadn’t been worse. It was for a lot of people. The only good news for the United States was that Ukraine joined the war on the opposite side of Russia in the hopes that we would send some soldiers to Donetsk. Russia sent more of their soldiers to Syria, so fighting in Donetsk did die down some. 

The next day, I had to talk about settling Boston, and the kids naturally wanted to know what I thought would happen in the war against Canada. Instead of offering my own opinion, I was dumb enough to ask the kids what they thought would happen. I had one kid from a Trump supporting family, and another whose transgender father had disappeared a year prior. This did not go well. The Trump supporter was certain we would beat Canada, take over all their land, get reparations from Germany and France, and, in his own words, “make America great again.” The other kid was hoping for a Canadian victory. He even joked that if the Canadians took over the United states we could get their health care, which, since one of the first actions of the new Trump government was to get rid of Obamacare, would be a dream come true for a lot of people. Finally, the Trump supporter accused the other kid of being a traitor to his country, and took a swing. Pretty soon not only were these two kids in a knock-down, drag-out fight on the floor, but several of their classmates had joined in on both sides, and I had completely lost control. The school’s police officer had to be called and several of the kids in my class were placed on in school suspension. The next day I was down to fifteen kids. 

It wasn’t the only example of Trump supporters becoming violent with people they viewed as traitors to the motherland. It was happening all around the country. Unfortunately, the media was so afraid of Trump and his supporters that they were not reporting it. Still, when I told my story at YAP and on livejournal, almost everyone knew of at least one similar story. 

October 1st was my birthday. We had our big family dinner as usual. The only good news was that my father no longer supported Trump. He was still a republican, but he considered Trump to not be a republican. Republicans, he opined, would support the constitution of the United States. It was cold that year, and the pool had been closed for weeks, so we wound up playing boccia. This is a game in which every player receives three colored balls. Then someone throws a small ball, and the goal is to roll your balls as close as possible to the small ball. The closest player gets a point for each of their balls that are closer to the small ball than anyone else’s balls. 

“Oh geeze,” she was crying again. “I can’t deal with my birthday. It’s the worst day of the year now that Dani is gone. The day I most remember her.”  
“Is that a good stopping point then?” Doctor Bell asked.   
“I guess so. I don’t think I can go on.”   
He passed her a tissue box, which she took and just sat there for a few more minutes. Finally she stood up and walked out. 

Her birthday was that Friday. She allowed her mother and father to cook her dinner but tried to insist she didn’t really want to celebrate. She had refused to pick a gift she wanted, and her parents had instead given her $100 cash. Kevin had given her a stuffed pikachu to go with the stuffed eevee she already had. She loved pikachu, but Pokemon Go was something she did with her sister. Although she’d probably amassed half her points by herself, she had started playing because Dani wanted someone to walk around downtown with. She still played, sometimes, but not regularly, and had been sitting at level 25 for about a year.


	10. Chapter 10

She found herself dashing in the door at exactly 3:00. Doctor Bell was waiting for her. He brought her back and offered a chocolate. She took two little kisses, and then perched in her chair again. 

I’m sure you know what happened next. Pictures started getting posted of muslims in concentration camps in Montana and South Dakota. Nur posted one of the lines of people. I was horrified. I mean, we were supposed to be a modern country! I guess Germany in 1940 was a modern country, too. Angela Merkel criticized the US for our policies on muslims, and compared it to the Holocaust. Liberal Americans were posting both furiously, and republicans were accusing them of being unpatriotic. James, who had spent the last 8 years claiming Obama was not his president, claimed that anyone who opposed Trump was unpatriotic. Trump, for his part, claimed Merkel must be “bleeding out of her… wherever.” Feminists went nuts, claiming he was unfit to be president, and opposed to 51% of the population. He certainly didn’t represent us. James applauded the elimination of the muslims. He claimed that the world would be better off without them, and terrorism would end. He suggested nuking all the muslim countries in the world, too, to get rid of all of them. Mark tried to deny the pictures were anything like the holocaust. He compared them more to pictures of the West Bank, but the pictures were much more clearly of holocaust like conditions. They showed lines of people getting ready to go through some kind of selection. Nothing else was coming out. Katy suspected it was because they were all dead. Dani suspected they were simply stealing all the cell phones and no more pictures were able to get out. I guess we were both right. Norman recognized that we had started a holocaust, and posted as much. This caused James and Mark to jump on him and call him names and paranoid. Pam moved to Israel. Muslim students continued to disappear from my school. 

Immigrants, even legal immigrants started being deported to Mexico. Trump’s supporters called it the Trump Train, and they rounded up as many Spanish speakers as they could find, and sent them to camps and then on trains into Mexico.People who had never been to Mexico in their lives were sent there. Guatemalans, Hondurans, it didn’t matter, everyone went to Mexico. 

School ended, and I was in grading hell again. This time I managed a bell curve around a 75% which was exactly what I wanted. I felt better about my ability to grade than I had years before working as a grader as a graduate student. Clearly understanding the material myself was key. 

Kim Jong Un said he admired Trump and was glad he had won the election. Trump responded by attempting to normalize relations with North Korea. He sent an ambassador there, for the first time in 50 years, and had Kim come to discuss civil rights for his people. Kim, of course, refused this. The state department still suggested not visiting North Korea but it was no longer illegal. I thought it was a terrible idea, but the same republicans who had thought opening relations with Cuba was a terrible idea when Obama did it, cheered Trump doing this. Norman pointed out the hypocrisy on YAP, and all the republicans tried to insist that giving North Koreans an amazon account would do more to bring democracy there than anything else. Victor pointed out that he had been making the exact same argument for years about Cuba. 

Classes started again. I had a full load this time. I had two classes of world history, two of US history, and one elective on Soviet history. I really enjoyed teaching the Soviet history class because it was an elective, and the kids who were in there wanted to be there. It was a good class, with only 20 kids in it. Most of these kids didn’t know any socialists, since they had either disappeared or left the country a year before. One of their fathers had disappeared, however. I almost felt bad talking about how evil socialism was with him, but really, what was I supposed to do? I had to tell the truth about the USSR. 

About a month later, Mexican citizens began to disappear. No one said anything about it, but my next door neighbors disappeared, along with many of my other neighbors, and many of my students. I was down to a class of 10 in almost all of my sections. The teachers at the school were worried about whether they’d have jobs the next year, and I was worried over whether I’d ever get one, competing with all these experienced teachers for positions. Fortunately as the year went on, these children were replaced with white faces. Kids who had lived in apartments were able to move into houses they previously couldn’t afford, and those kids filled our schools. Some of the inner city schools were still in trouble, but in the suburbs, schools were filling up again. 

Immigrants from around the world began to disappear, also. Victor was forced to move to Israel, and when I talked to him he seemed utterly depressed about the fact that the country he had chosen and had sworn allegiance to had rejected him completely. His company had fortunately chosen to keep him employed as a distance employee, so he was able to continue working from home, and continued his frequent trips to Europe to help partner companies out on a regular basis. He was living in Jerusalem, in a house with the two of his sons who were still under 18. His older sons had stayed in their childhood home to continue going to colleges nearby. He reported the force to YAP. Policemen had come to his house in the middle of the night and told him to pack a suitcase and that was all he’d been allowed to bring with him on his trip. He was one of the lucky ones in that his eldest sons would make sure no one looted the house and took everything, and would mail some smaller things to him that he had forgotten. Mark, who had returned full of vitriol after the bombing cost him his leg, claimed that Victor’s story was completely false, and Victor was looking for attention. James applauded the story and said that we should take our country back anyway possible, even if that meant a few people lost citizenship. 

Melania got sick of Trump’s anti-immigrant sentiment shortly after it started. I mean, can you imagine the gall, having an immigrant wife, and starting to deport American citizens for being immigrants? It was a disaster. She divorced Trump and went back to Slovenia. She took her kids, which, although Trump had required Victor to take his kids to Israel, infuriated him when his own kids left. He quickened his attempts at deporting immigrants, and several people around my neighborhood disappeared overnight. The once busy bus stop only had one kid still using it. He used to be the lone white face at the bus stop, so it made me uncomfortable seeing him as the sole survivor. I knew I lived in a neighborhood with a lot of immigrants, but I hadn’t realized the full extent of the deportations until they were all gone. Slowly, people started moving back into those houses, and they were almost all white people. It was like wherever you looked it was all white people. The only exception was downtown Atlanta. It still had a lot of African Americans, but almost no Hispanics or Asians anymore. Melania started a website for former immigrants who had been deported by her husband to try to regain their American citizenship. There was no luck with it at all, but a lot of people from around the world came together on it. A lot of people were very bitter and didn’t want to return, but there were a sizable number of people who were better off in any America than they were at home, and wanted to return. 

The only good news was that Dani announced she was pregnant. She was expecting a girl, whom she’d name Emma this time. She was very excited that she would manage to have two children after marrying late and thinking for years that she would never have children. Adam had been a miracle, Emma was a double miracle given her age already. No one expected it, but she was thrilled. 

I managed to get a job at the private high school I had graduated from in 2000. It was a religious Christian school, and we had chapel services every week, which I was expected to attend except when they had communion. It was due to my efforts back in the 1990s that nonchristian students no longer had to attend communion services. They used to only allow the Jews out of it, but we had come together with our parents and all the nonchristian students and convinced the school not only to fire the chaplain that made that rule but to allow all nonchristian students to not attend communion services. The services were generally inoffensive. We had the same chaplain who had started working there when I was in high school. He had been my home room advisor, but didn’t recognize me. I guess he had a lot of students come through. The only other teacher who was the same since I had been there was the middle school principal, Mike Shields. He had also been my home room teacher when I was in 8th grade, but didn’t remember me either. I guess 19 years was enough for almost complete turnover of the teachers. Mr Nichols, who taught me world history, had retired the year prior, and I was taking his position. I had all world history classes and one elective on World War II history. 

I decided to renew my passport,, which was set to expire later that year, just in case, after what happened to Victor. My family had lived in the United States since the 1700s, but Kevin was a first generation American on his father’s side, and I could see him getting deported to Sweden, and wanted to be prepared to go with him if that happened. I mailed all my documents off at the post office, and then called my senator panicked that I wouldn’t get them back in time. He managed to speed things up for me so that I got it back in two weeks. 

I guess the Russians were tired of being at war because a palace coup in Russia deposed Putin and Zhirinovsky took over as leader of the country. He had been the leader of the Socialist Party in Russia prior to this, and Victor had thought he had no support, but when he promised to bring an end to the war in Syria and Ukraine people rallied behind him, and he was able to secure power after killing Putin. The next thing anyone knew the KGB was back in full force, and political parties had been outlawed. They renamed themselves the USSR again, and nationalized all businesses. They fully invaded Ukraine, which the United States had to respond to by sending soldiers to help Ukraine since we had promised them aid and defense in exchange for them not trying to make nuclear bombs. The proxy war with Russia was no longer a proxy war, and apparently no one ever told Trump not to invade Russia in the winter. Admittedly, it was August, but no one thought a war could be completed within a month, and winter comes early to Russia. 

She paused as though she had to think for a moment, and then signed. “It think that’s a stopping point for today. I’ll see you next week. We’ll talk about the end of my teaching career. I don’t think I can handle it today. Not so soon after my birthday.”  
“Okay. Will you be alright for the next week? You’re not considering hurting yourself or anyone else are you?”  
“No, I’m not. I haven’t considered that in years, despite everything.”  
“Good. I remember a time when this would have pushed you over.”  
“Yes, I remember it too, but as long as Doctor Gordon-Brown keeps the geodon flowing, I’ll be fine.”  
“Next week, same time?”  
“Same time next week.”  
She stood up, and led the way down the hall until she reached the exit. He scanned his badge allowing her out, and she stopped to make her next appointment. 

She went home and relieved the babysitter, who informed her that she and her girlfriend were pregnant again. Katy hugged her, and told her how happy she was for her. She already had a son who came with her to babysit, who was about Adam’s age. She assured Jess that she would welcome the new addition to come as long as Jess wanted to babysit for them, and offered to babysit when needed as well. She and Jess decided to put all the kids in strollers and go to downtown Norcross and play some pokemon go before Jess left for the day. It was October, but it was warm, so they didn’t need sweatshirts or jackets, which was unusual for the time of year, but had become more normal over the past five years. Five years ago, the first time Katy didn’t need a jacket until December, she freaked out. Now it was the status quo, and she had gotten used to it. She was happy she was able to wear her sandals almost year round now, and stopped buying sweatshirts. They were able to catch several pidgies, which despite several years of promises from the parent company nianitic were still overwhelmingly what people were able to find and catch on the game, along with rattatas. In addition she found a cubone and a tauros, before they gave up for the day. Jess caught a pikachu, but Katy's version of the same ran away and she was unable to catch it. This happened repeatedly to her with pikachus, and the only one she had managed to get was out of an egg. She had kept it for years hoping that she would be able to evolve it one day, but so far that didn’t look like it was going to happen.


	11. Chapter 11

The next week she was back in Doctor Bell’s office. “I think we were about to talk about your first year teaching,” he prompted. 

The first paper I assigned, that was due the last week of August, one of my students completely plagiarized off of wikipedia. He turned in a paper on medieval art that still had the little blue numbers in it indicating a reference, and it included a section on martial arts because he didn’t realize that that didn’t apply to medieval art at all. I had to fail him and bring him up on disciplinary charges, which was a lot of extra work. He tried to deny the plagiarism, but a simple google search brought up exact sentences from wikipedia. He was given a week worth of in school suspension, and failed my class. This meant he had to take it again the next year, since it was a required class to graduate, so he probably just bought himself an extra year in high school. 

That month, Trump was caught groping an intern. Melania was not as gracious about this as Hillary had been, and threw a fit. There was a huge investigation led by the FBI, which Trump had not managed to disband yet. The young woman sued, and it got sent to the Supreme Court, since congress had been disbanded. Trump told the Supreme Court that if they touched him, they would be disbanded, and as they saw themselves as the last vestiges of democracy, they caved and did nothing. That was the beginning of the end though; it was the last time we publicly saw Melania until she was back in Slovenia. 

Shortly after the cheating student returned to my class, I decided he was a vampire. It was the first time I decided that about someone I could actually see, rather than someone from the internet. I had a lot of trouble teaching him. And I complained about this to Victor who reminded me that my stone would keep me safe, and I just needed to make sure I touched it every month. I could send any vampires to Victor and he would kill them, and I just needed to keep myself together and do my job. There was no other option, since there was no more disability to fall back on. It was only marginally helpful. These episodes became more and more prolonged, and started happening to my friends and students instead of just people I found difficult to get along with on the internet. 

I decided to spend fall break in a mental hospital. In the Emergency Room on the way in, I ran into Rob, whom I had dated in the seventh grade. We ended up talking about the temple we belonged to, and whether we kept up with anyone else from those days. The only person either of us knew anymore was Abby, and even that was only on Facebook. Rob was a doctor, working towards becoming a neurosurgeon, but in the mean time working in the emergency room at Dekalb hospital. He agreed to admit me to Peachford hospital for a stay. Because I was going willingly I was allowed to drive over there, and didn’t need to be driven In by a police officer. I arrived, and went up to the counter before the double doors. I handed them the note from Rob, and waited. Finally someone wearing scrubs came and took my shoes from me. I didn’t have any other contraband, but they checked my hair for bobby pins and anything else I may have hidden in it before allowing me back into the ward. It was lunch time, and I was handed a lunch before I was completely processed. After they fed me they checked my blood pressure, blood sugar, and took several vials of blood to check for whatever it was they tested blood for. They had me pee in a cup to test for drugs. Then they read me a list of rules which basically came down to no drugs, no alcohol, and no fraternizing with the men. I shared a room with another girl, and we had a bathroom in there, including a shower, but I had to ask permission to use a razor to shave, or a toothbrush. They expected me to ask about the toothbrush twice a day, and not doing so would be cause for concern. I asked if they had a toothbrush for me, as I hadn’t brought my own, and they produced one. 

The doctor came out and confronted me about the fact that there were no medicines whatsoever in my urine. I couldn’t afford any so I wasn’t on any. He asked me what had worked in the past and I told him. He was willing to give me exactly what I asked for, so I was able to get back on the geodon. 

I wandered around the ward for a few minutes. The walls were completely white without any decoration in the main room, but the couches were pink. Three women sat on the couch watching The View. Most of the other women were outside on the patio smoking cigarettes. I sighed. I hated TV, but I hated smoke, too, so I wasn’t sure what I would do in my down time. A tree hung over the patio offering a little bit of shade in the Atlanta summer. I joined the smoking women, because it was certainly better than watching The View. We talked, and they smoked until a bell sounded alerting everyone to the next group. They put out their cigarettes and we walked in a line to a classroom with the men. They put on a video about depression, and I realized this was a mistake. It was meant for suicidal people, not people who were hallucinating. No one would do anything for me there. The best thing that happened to me in the hospital was that people came with therapy dogs, and we were allowed to play with the puppies for an hour. I held one on my lap, a little shih tzu. It reminded me of Rogue, but was a slightly whiter color; also it was male. So maybe it reminded me of Dani’s childhood dog, Spike. 

72 hours later, I was released with a full medicine bottle, and high hopes that at least that would help me to calm down. Clearly that wasn’t meant to be. I managed to remain calm for the rest of the month that I had that bottle of medicine, and I managed to see another psychiatrist to get it refilled once. There was some hope that I would hold it together, but not even my doctor really believed in me. She suggested moving to Israel, but Israel had joined the war against the US when pictures of the genocide started making their way to the internet. I was no longer certain I could get a place there and immigrate so easily. The new doctor also started me back on klonopin, which I kept in my purse, just in case. 

In January, school started again, and a week later Dani had her daughter, Emma. The same day, a student in my class broke into my desk, and started rummaging through my purse until she found my bottle of klononpin which she stole. She took enough to get high, and when I reported her to the police, I got in trouble at work for having drugs there in the first place, despite the fact that they were prescription. That was the final straw for me. I decided that student was a zombie, and had no brain, and the next day I was found screaming and ranting about my students being brainless zombies and evil vampires in front of a room full of terrified 10th graders. I was fired, and sent back to the mental hospital. This time I was not willingly put in, and they wouldn’t let me have my CPAP because it had wires on it. They gave me a private room instead, which was nice, but I kept having nightmares about everything you could imagine because without my CPAP that happens. Furthermore, I was not allowed out of the ward to go to the cafeteria, and just had to eat whatever was brought to me for two days. After two days they asked me if I was willing to sign voluntary commitment paperwork so that I could go to the cafeteria. I agreed, though I shouldn’t have because that meant that they could keep me indefinitely instead of only having 72 hours to figure me out and send me home. 

I was there over a weekend, when there are no classes, except for the therapy dogs that come in weekly. This meant we had to find ways to occupy ourselves. We did this with some markers and coloring pages, and a deck of cards. There were four of us in my little clique and so we were able to play a lot of spades, and another game that one of the girls in the group knew and taught everyone. She played with her family when they came to visit. My husband and parents came to visit both days of the weekend. One day my husband tried to show me something on his phone, and the guards immediately moved in to stop him. Apparently I could get too excited by technology and wasn’t allowed to see it even if I wasn’t the one using it. There was a guy in there who was probably 80 years old and he kept yelling “I’ll kill ya!” at random people and then trying to get out of his wheelchair and attack them, but before he could get to them, he’d fall over. The hospital put a guard on him specifically. Another guy in a wheelchair, a disabled veteran like me, was beaten about the head and shoulders by a police officer for mouthing off. They put a guard on him, too even though he’d done nothing but be smart to a police officer. He was still in the hospital a month later when I left, and would probably be going to transitional housing while I was allowed to go home with my husband taking on a more official role as a caretaker. 

While I was in the hospital, I had a social worker come talk to me every two days. She said I had to make plans for how to continue living without my job and without any income. The only thing I could think of to do was move to Israel. I knew Kevin didn’t want to, but certainly I could get on disability there, and survive. We couldn’t survive without my income in the United States. I told the social worker this and she asked what I would need to accomplish to do this. I told her I would need to sell my house, my husband would need to find a job in Israel, I would need to save the money to get two plane tickets to Israel, we’d have to find something to do about my cats since no one has pet cats in Israel and they are considered something of a pest. 

Suddenly I was overwhelmed with the planning that needed to be done. But I knew I was making the only decision that could possibly be made. I used the end of my calling card to call Victor and see if plans could be made for him to help me until I could get onto disability, and he agreed to that. Then I called my parents and told them I wanted to sell the house, but they said that Kevin should continue living there while he searched for a job in Israel, and he could come join me once I got an income situated in Israel. I was released from the hospital on February 5th with the understanding that I’d leave the country as soon as possible. A week later I had purchased a single plane ticket to Israel flying through Kennedy in New York. I got on the plane, and had the overwhelming urge to yell Allah hu Akbar just to scare people, because I felt like it was silly, but I recongized that I could get kicked of the plane, so I didn’t do that. I simply sat in my chair and stared straight ahead. Once again I paid the $26 to get online throughout the flight. I was able to chat with Victor and Kevin or the duration of the flight. I was starting to panic. Moving to Israel seemed like such a big deal all of a sudden, and being without my husband, even if I would have Victor seemed intimidating. I didn’t want Victor to get sick of me. I was afraid he would if he had to deal with all my episodes. Although he had been dealing with them for the last 10 years, doing it as regularly as I had episodes recently might seem less okay. Also if I was supposed to send vampires to him to die, if I saw him and vampires at the same time I was afraid the trick might stop working. I asked him and he said not to worry because we’d work something out. We always had. And he was good at manipulating my schizophrenic episodes to be beneficial, or at least not terrifying. 

I didn’t sleep at all on the flight, so I was up for 24 hours straight. When I got to the airport, Victor and his wife were there waiting for me. There were people dancing in the hallway of the airport welcoming new immigrants to Israel. We say that someone who has immigrated to Israel has risen up. I danced with the dancers for a moment or two since I knew my luggage would be delayed. I had only managed to pack two suitcases and a book bag full of stuff for the move. It was mostly clothing, but I had packed a stuffed animal my parents had given me the day I was born. IT was worn and tattered. Part of the neck was torn. I had never been apart from it for more than a week and I kept it with me even though it meant I could carry less clothing and potentially valuable stuff with me. 

I hugged Victor, and we walked to the luggage carousel. We stood with a long line of people. Customs turned out to be almost nothing. I simply walked through a line and gave them my passport. They gave me a card and told me to keep it with me at all times as that was what they did instead of stamping passports because several of the neighboring countries wouldn’t allow you into their country if you had a stamp from Israel. Rather than risk that for all the jews, they simply stopped stamping passports. I had to apply for permission to stay the next day, but even that was almost no work. I turned in some paperwork stating that I was Jewish, and they welcomed me to the country. They asked if I had an address in Israel, and I gave them Victor’s. And that was that; I was an Israeli citizen as well as keeping my American citizenship. 

Victor lived in Jerusalem, which was about an hour’s drive from the airport. The whole time there I slept in the car, which I think suited him just fine as my extroverted self can sometimes be a bit much for him since he’s an introvert. He often doesn’t answer me when I try to talk to him because I’m just too much. So I slept, and he and his wife listened to the radio. He woke me up about 5 minutes outside of Jerusalem so that I could see the city driving into it. Jerusalem is all the color of dust, because all of the buildings need to be made out of Jerusalem stone so it all looks alike. You can see King David’s Wall as you drive into the city and pass the checkpoints. Victor had Israeli plates, so he was allowed into the city without any further questions. We drove to the suburbs, where Victor had a small house. “We don’t have a bed for you, but we do have your own room with an air mattress,” he told me. I smiled. “It’s not the first time I’ve slept on an air mattress for an extended period of time.” I told him. 

I met Victor’s two youngest sons Dante and Julian. They were both teenagers, so I considered them relatively harmless. Julian was 15 and Dante was 17 so Dante was getting ready to join the army, which all children in Israel have to do when they turn 18. It’s weird, because I’m used to considering 18 year olds to be children, but in Israel, they really aren’t. They are responsible adults, years before American children become so. I went into my room and called my husband. I had received a text message saying that text messages were free and calls were ten cents a minute. So I called my husband to let him know I’d arrived, Victor had picked me up safely, and life seemed good. Then I plugged in my computer, and started looking up how to apply for disability. I knew I had to do it quickly because Kevin wouldn’t move here until I had done so. Finally, after I’d been awake about 33 hours, I collapsed and fell asleep, waking up a day later around 4 in the morning. I picked back up where I had left off looking for disability, and otherwise chatting on the internet. I took a taxi into Western Jerusalem and went to the Western Wall where I put a prayer to be reunited with my husband as soon as possible into a crack in the wall. I cried at the wall this time, which I had not done on my trip to Israel the year prior. Everything just seemed so overwhelming at this point, because I was separated from my husband, I didn’t speak or read the language around me, and I didn’t know what was going to happen next. Victor helped me by showing me a foreign language school run by the government to help newcomers learn Hebrew. It was free, so I enrolled in the next set of classes to start. Classes were an hour a day every evening during the week, or all day Saturday depending on which option you would like to take. I opted for the daily one thinking it would give me something to do besides sit on the internet. I missed the PRRC because that had given me things to do all the time, and I had never ben able to replace it. 

Victor also helped me to understand the government health care system, and how I needed to get on it, so that I could once again take the antipsychotics I so desperately needed. The medicines were only $3 a month, as opposed to the several hundreds they ran me in the United States. I was able to get meds, and remain on them for the first time since Trump had become president. 

Classes started March 1, and I got about a month into them before things went downhill. I started seeing vampires, but I had previously believed that coming within 100 miles of Victor would kill a vampire. Since I could see him with them, that clearly wasn’t true. He tried to calm me down by telling me they weren’t vampires at all and were simply the spirits of my friends, who were coming to visit me, but it didn’t work at all, and I remained in a complete state of panic for the next week. There was nothing anyone could do. I went to the hospital and they gave me xanax, which had usually worked pretty well. It would work for 3-4 hours and then the panic would come back. I took klonopin but it didn’t make the panic subside. 

Meanwhile Russia sent nuclear weapons to Cuba in defense of Canada. Trump tried to bluster his way through a Kennedy-esque matter of diplomacy, but completely failed, and the weapons were set up right outside of Guantanamo, and furthermore Cuba decided to stop renting us Guantanamo and had their military come in and free all the detainees who were still there, and send them back to Iraq and Afghanistan. Kelly got sick of finding previously detained people as she did patrols and sent me a letter about it, but it was heavily censored and I could only just get the gist of what she was complaining about. 

It was May 10th again; George’s birthday. Trump responded to the nuclear weapons right outside of Florida by dropping a nuclear bomb on Moscow and one on St Petersburg Russia. Even George and James freaked out about this. Mutually Assured Destruction was supposed to stop this from happening, but Trump had done it anyway. And he dropped them on a country we know have nuclear bombs. The bomb missed Red Square, and Zharnakovsky survived. 

She stopped. “I can’t. We’ll continue next time ok?”  
“Sure. I understand. Will You be okay?”  
“Yes, I’ll live.” 

 

She was dreading Monday. She knew she finally had to talk about losing her sister and brother-in-law. That was going to hurt, and there was nothing Doctor Bell could say to make it hurt any less. Nonetheless, it had to be done.


	12. Chapter 12

She was almost late the next week because she had trouble getting out of bed. However, at promptly 3pm she found herself face to face with her doctor. 

“We were talking about the nuclear attacks.” he prompted her.   
“yes. I really don’t want to.”  
“I think you need to. I’ve been waiting for you to get here.”   
She sighed. 

The next day, Zhirinovsky dropped nuclear weapons on the United States. New York, Los Angeles, Washington DC, and of course Atlanta were destroyed. Dani and George were downtown at an Atlanta hockey fans meet up with our friend Keith and Jonathan. They were killed instantly. The bomb destroyed everything west of Decatur to the western edge of the Perimeter. They had no chance. Their kids were with my parents in Norcross, so, they may have some developmental problems, but they survived. 

The only good news from this was that Trump was killed int he New York City bombing. I heard that on the news from Victor who came yelling for me. I looked at the news, and simply whimpered, “mamma?” I asked, “daddy?” I tried to call home, but there was no way to get a phone call into any of the affected cities. There was no way to get anything except for the news which Victor and I watched unendingly. I had never touched him beyond shaking hands when we first met but I curled up in a ball and asked him to hug me, which he did. His mother had also been deported to Israel, but his younger brother had managed to stay in New York, so he was also lacking news about his family. His brother was more likely in New Jersey, but, there was no way to know for sure since people from New Jersey regularly go to New York. 

The news finally broke that Elizabeth Warren, who had been back at home during this had claimed the presidency and vowed to restore democracy She immediately restored the supreme court and congress. Then she found out about the camps. She immediately ordered everyone in the camps released. Most of the United States was unable to get online because the internet mostly ran through New York. In Israel, I had access through Tel Aviv, but none of my friends were able to get online to tell me anything, so it was still just watching the news. They told about how there had been death camps, and muslims were being killed by the millions. Two million muslims had been killed out of the three million who had previously existed in The United States. In addition, 300,000 of the 700,000 transgender individuals had been killed. A million socialists had been killed. These people were trying to return to their homes, but finding them occupied and when they tried to assert ownership of their own things they were killed. 

It was a full day later before the phones started working, and the internet started working in the United States again. I called my sister and got no answer. I called my mother, already terrified of what I was going to hear. She confirmed my fears. Dani and George were dead. Mom asked me to come home and go to the funeral. In addition, was it possible for me to adopt Adam and Emma? She would do it but she was getting old, and she was afraid that if their adoptive parents died after their biological parents died, they’d be traumatized for life. I agreed to take the children. 

Internet service also resumed in the United States. People were able to get online even if they still couldn’t get a phone line. Nur had managed to get online and told us that she had survived the concentration camps, but Zainab and Seth had not. People were living in displaced person’s camps. Nur was planning to move to Malaysia where she knew a couple people. Aedan moved in with his mother and tried to restart his dog walking business. Drake had died. 

The good news was that disability payments resumed immediately, with backpay, which was enough to get us completely out of debt. They also paid two years worth of a salary to everyone who had survived the camps. 

We held the funeral quickly. There were a lot of funerals to contend with, but fewer in Marietta where Temple Kol Emeth was. Dani and George’s bodies were intact enough to allow a wake, and we held one. The bodies were out in the open and people lined up to kiss them on the forehead one last time. Adam kissed his mother, and burst into tears. It was the first time he realized that she was dead. Rabbi Boxt was still around to perform the ceremony, and I gave the eulogy. I very nearly didn’t get through it. I don’t even remember what I said, even though I had planned it out on the trip home from Israel. 

I was only vaguely aware of politics. Elizabeth Warren was running unopposed in the democratic primary, which meant I didn’t have to make a decision yet. Paul Ryan, Rubio, and Jeb Bush were running as republicans. Norman decided that the republican party should have imploded. Victor wanted a right leaning opposition party, but thought it should be the libertarians. He still posted at YAP despite no longer living in the United States. He was offered his citizenship back, but decided to stay in Israel. 

I was more concerned with the fact that Emma could now sit up on her own, and no longer had to be confined to a seat of some kind. She started putting everything she could reach in her mouth. The next month Adam started kindergarten, and had a teacher named Ms DeLoach. He was already reading, and apparently had been to some degree since he was two years old, so he was way ahead of the rest of his kindergarten class. They spent most of the year learning letters, which he could already put together into words and spell some simple things such as his own name. We continued to work with him on reading and writing at home, and allowed him to learn math with his classmates. He liked the math manipulative and the unit blocks that he could build with. He picked up on addition and subtraction quickly, but struggled to apply it to real life situations like money. 

We had also acquired Dani and George’s two cats, Aaron and Aggie, giving us two dogs and two cats, which was a lot of pets. In addition, neither of our dogs liked the cats at all. Jack would snarl at them regularly and Rogue was her usual stand-offish self. For his part, Aaron was regularly scratching at the dogs, and not doing anything to endear himself to them. He hissed if they came anywhere near him. We tried locking the cats in the bathroom for a while, and then locking them in the bedroom and locking the dogs out of the bedroom except at night. The vet seemed to think this would just encourage the cats to think there was something to be afraid of, however, so one day I opened the door and let them interact. It was never perfect, but it went better than I had feared. 

On August 15, they made a change I had always hoped for since I had been voting. They had nation-wide primaries. My dad voted for Jeb, and James and Mark voted for Rubio. Elizabeth Warren was running unopposed and so I didn’t bother to vote and nor did Kevin. 

Emma learned to speak a little bit. Her first word was to call Kevin “dada” which angered Adam. He yelled at her, “he’s not your father! Your father is dead! Get that? Dead!” I think that crushed Kevin, at the same time he was so thrilled to be called “dada” by Emma. I had to have a little chat with Adam, because of this. I told him that he had to be polite, and that we didn’t mind if he continued to call us aunt and uncle, but we were doing our best and would treat him as if he were our own son. He cried, and pouted, but I think he understood. He understood that his parents couldn’t come back for him, and that we loved him. He promised not to throw outbursts when Emma called us mama and dada again. But he wouldn’t promise to call us that himself. 

Paul Ryan won the primary, and ran against Elizabeth Warren in November. Elizabeth Warren won in a landslide, even without so many voters in big cities. She actually lost the popular vote and won the electoral college, which, like democrats four years earlier, had republicans screaming to repeal the thing. Dad voted for Ryan, claiming he was a real republican, unlike Trump. James and Mark voted for Ryan. Norman, Victor, and I voted for Warren. So that was the end of the disaster. My sister, brother-in-law were dead, and so were several of my friends. 66% of the Muslims I knew were dead, and the other 33% had left America permanently. Most of the Jews I knew had moved to Israel. 

The first thing Warren did was sue everyone for peace. Russia tried to divide the United States up amongst the victors as Germany had been divided after World War II, but Canada didn’t really want Russia on their border either, so they tried to insist that there should still be an independent United States. Maine voted to remain a part of Canada, and Canada was willing to extend that privilege to them. So Maine became a Canadian province. Russia claimed territory in Donetsk, which caused Ukraine to declare war on Russia, and the war would continue within the New Soviet Union. Zhirinovsky declared that the former soviet bloc countries that had elected pro-Russian leaders could decide to join him in a new Soviet Union, and most did make that decision. This time, however, America no longer had the high road to claim democracy was any better than communism, and thus Germany had to take the lead and become the leader of the free countries. They were still unwilling to spend a significant portion of their GDP on military expenditures, however, and science and technology became led by the Soviets. They were unwilling to share, however, and soon led the new space race to Mars. America tried to lead in technology with both microsoft and apple taking positions vying for the new technological leader. Unfortunately, apple had stopped really innovating years before with the death of Steve Jobs, and microsoft long before that. Slowly, German companies started to take over innovating. Things became more expensive in The United States. Slowly, the stock market started to recover, but foreign investors felt more comfortable investing in German stocks than American, so it never regained its former glory. 

As for me, I moved permanently back to the US, and adopted my sister’s kids and cats. The VA started functioning again, giving me reliable health care and regular access to my meds that I so desperately needed. Victor eventually came back, too, because his company wanted him to work at their office if he could. They were willing to extend him work at home privileges while they had to, but really wanted him back in Boston. Mark’s leg had to be amputated which mellowed him some when he could no longer drink because of the pain killers he was on. James was eventually banned from YAP because Diane had been threatening to ban him for years, and finally I guess, just got sick of his nonsense. Emma now walks and talks and is starting preschool at the JCC. Adam is in kindergarten, and loves his teacher but hates math. Kevin got a new job. The stock market recovered enough for my parents to go into a second retirement, however, they were not able to continue traveling as much as they used to do.


End file.
